Greetings,

You should be able to go into your preferences and set the agent to "use at most X % of CPU". The old agent set this to 60% by default.

You can set X to whatever you want but setting it back to 60 would probably be your best bet since that is what you are used to. But you can play around with this and find the proper setting for your laptop.

-Uplinger

How many jobs do you see running in the tasks on BOINC? If you see two, then you probably have a dual core (Intel Core2Duo or AMD X2) laptop.
One way I found around the heat on a Core 2 Duo laptop I have I set in my profile to use at most 1 processors. Only one job works at a time in BOINC, but I figure that's better than burning up the laptop and having no contributions. I think the manufacturer shorted me on the processor cooling, so that is how I keep it in the maintainable range and the laptop happy. And in task manager I see a nice smooth 50% processor usage as one core is busy and the other is idle.
Another way I use on my laptops to keep heat down (it might not help much, I don't know) is to set the amount of writes to my hard drive to a higher setting. For example, on my desktops I have the "Write at Most Every" set to 60 seconds, which allows BOINC to write to the hard drive once every 60 seconds, while on the laptop I have the setting set at something higher like 300 seconds, which is 5 minutes if I have my math right. I think you can set that setting to up to 999 seconds. Laptops are constantly spinning up and down their hard drives, which is hard on the drives. So if the laptop is just working on BOINC then this might help with the amount of times the drive spins up to write. Of course if the laptop is being used the hard drive will be spinning already and it won't matter too much.
Just my work arounds for hotter laptops. Hopefully these help. It's best to try different things and see what works. You can also pick up a laptop cooler for pretty cheap and those help. I usually prop mine up a little in the back end if it is sitting on a table. I found a cookie cooling rack works well. It allows more air to flow beneath the laptop for better cooling.