Best way to cool down and ventilate laptop?

I use my laptop as a desktop (i plug it into my tv) to play games like warcraft and fallout 3, and these games quickly cause the laptop to overheat and give me periodic lag spikes. Now the laptops hardware should be able to play these games no problem, so its solely caused by heat. Buying a cooling pad is an obvious fix I guess, but I am short on cash at the moment so does anyone have any suggestions? Thanks.