A tale of two computers (Mechwarrior Online)

Hi guys, currently my (and some of my friends) most played intensive PC game is Mechwarrior Online. It's a fun F2P mech simulator combat game of Mechwarrior/Battletech fame. Unfortunately it's also one unoptimized buggy as hell game, that's doing its level best to murder my old PCs. Here are my current gaming PCs thats i'm trying to figure things out for. I already have a new rig, but i'm thinking of giving my old desktop away to a friend so he can play MWO with us.

Desktop
Core 2 Duo E8500 3.16 ghz
EP43-DS3L Socket 775 Gigabyte
GTX 260 896 mb EVGA
4 gbs DDR2 800 Corsair
320 GB Western Digital
Win7 Ultimate 64 bit

Laptop
Toshiba Qosmio x505-870
Core i7 720 QM @1.60 Ghz (damn thing is slow)
4 gbs DDR3 1066 GSkill
GeForce GTS 360M 1 gb
500 gb Hitachi
Win 7 Home Premium 64 bit

Initially, when i first started playing back in Nov, my laptop was able to run the game pretty well. 1368x766 res on medium settings were giving me 25-30ish FPS, not too good for most folks, but for me was good enough. The desktop was a notch slower same res, 5 less fps on avg, and on lowest settings. As long as i was getting 25-30 fps i could fight effectively (in fact when i got my new comp i was having issues playing at smooth 60 fps, haha). However recently in late Jan after a few patches suddenly the situation reversed. My desktop started to run the game better where i was having at medium while the laptop was set on low. However my laptop then started to have serious freezing issues. MWO was always buggy (athough it was really stable for a short period on both comps) but now my laptop would just freeze in game. I got a huge ass laptop cooler which was working but now doesnt seem to effect anything, as the game isnt causing irrational heat spikes (mid high 70s on cpu which is nothing for heat monster) to cause thermal shutdown. For the life of me i dont know what to do as these are hard freezes where i need to cold restart, which is surely harmful to my laptop.

I've already a few simple upgrades lined up for the desktop that should be able to run this game fairly well in the near future (new after market cpu cooler, a better used GPU, and OCing everything in the bucket). Unless of course a future patch borks everything up, which is a good possibility.

On the same note i'm praying for a future optimization patch that'll turn my laptop back to its old working order. There isnt much for me to do to upgrade or tweak when the best solution just to buy a new laptop. Unless i can safely OC it, which i'm kinda loathe to do since it's already heat monster, i think i'm stuck in this regard. Which sucks balls since now i need to lug my gaming desktop around to LAN parties.

Anyone else with similar system specs to me with this game? I'm fresh out of ideas atm on what to do.