Flash appears to be killing my laptop

Here's what happens: Will hop on laptop and surf the web without issue. However, when i have Adobe flash &/or shockwave playing it will eventually slow down my browser to the point that I have to ctl+alt+del and end the process. Happens with both chrome and FireFox, despite having tried to reinstall both browsers as well as trying to reinstall flash and shockwave. Will run a virus scan tonite to double check, but seems like more of a hardware issue. With my warranty ending in Feb I'd like to know whats going on before its too late

If you're looking for suggestions, I'm sure Google can turn up hundreds of them. If you're looking for answers, it would definitely help if you actually provided some information about your computer, what websites you are visiting that are causing the problem, what you have tried to resolve the issue, when the problem started occuring, etc.