Plugging the laptop into a physically larger monitor, and using a regular mouse, are both excellent strategies when you're home at the desk. It's much easier to see what you're doing modeling, scene setup, etc.

But for rendering, the heat dissipation limitations of a laptop chassis can't be avoided.

Perhaps a solution for you would be to get a render slave (blade or tower), so that you could do all the setup on the laptop, then send the render to the remote (aka render slave). If you choose to do that, I recommend buying used enterprise gear instead of buying a new Wal-Mart special.

Get something with two HyperThreaded hex-core processors, and enough RAM to support your rendering habits. Dual X5650 Xeons Dual X5650 processors will give you twenty four render threads.

Poser 12, in feet.  

OSes:  Win7Prox64, Win7Ultx64

Silo Pro 2.5.6 64bit, Vue Infinite 2014.7, Genetica 4.0 Studio, UV Mapper Pro, UV Layout Pro, PhotoImpact X3, GIF Animator 5