This has only started happening recently with the hot weather. My laptop keeps overheating when I play delta force black hawk down. I know...

It's the cpu usage that seems to be the problem. When it gets very hot after about 30/40 minutes of use, the cpu usage goes up to 100%. This is probably because I only have on-board graphics.
So I was thinking if I got a operating system that used less resources that might help. The game will run on windows 98! lol. So if I got an old copy of windows 98 do you think that would help the cpu cope a little better?
Or would the game run on a different less resource hungry OS like linux maybe? I've got about 20gb space on the hard drive