My laptop motherboard burnt and I can't find international assistance.

Question

I bought two HP Pavilion tx1030la Notebook PC in Chile. I lived and worked there.
Then I moved back to Brazil.
1 and 1/2 year later one of them had its motherboard toasted. The second one, less used, already lost the wireless and the screen goes blank very often. It will burn soon.
From day 1, both were extremely hot at the vents, but since both were like this, I figured it should be some design flaw.
I couldn't expect to lose 2 expensive laptops, with touchscreen, voice recognition, handwriting recognition, fingerprint recognition, full multimedia package, TL50 Processor AMD Turion 64X2, 120GB hard disk Enhanced IDE 5400 RPM SATA, 1024 MB RAM 667Mhz DDR2, DVD+-RW with Lightscribe, Windows Vista, Graphics NVidia and so on.
Now I know I am not alone out there. It happened with a whole bunch of other people and it follows the same steps: too hot, screen going blank, problems turning on and then death by heat. And sometimes, in the process, losing the wireless function.
Now I know it wasn't a design flaw. It is an engineering flaw.
But what's boiling for me? Well, besides having lost 2 new laptops... I am in an HP assistance limbo. I've been tossed into oblivion, only because I live in a different country than the country of purchase.
So, because I moved from one country to another, HP is diregarding the problem, as if it did not exist. HP US does not respond. HP Chile does not respond. HP Brazil said, over the phone, that laptops bought abroad won't be serviced in Brazil, but wouldn't put this into writing.  
In my frustrated contact attempts with HP assistance I had just a few simple questions:
1) Is 1 and ½ years the expected life span of an HP Laptop?
2) Is it a flaw in the project that they get so hot? (now I know this problem is big, with many customers around the globe suffering from the same problem.)
3) What can I do to prevent the second one from burning too? (in a vain effort to stretch the life of the second one, I updated the bios and increased the RAM to max specs)
4) What can HP do to help me with my burned laptop? 
So, anyone out there can shed a light into this? I will be grateful. 

Answer 1

While I hope GarenT can assist you, I did want to mention that the heat issue is not - to my knowledge - a problem with one particular notebook, but more a problem with notebooks in general.  You have all the same stuff that you put in a desktop in a much smaller amount of space, often used on laps and in warm environments for long periods of time.  To keep your other notebook from having heat-related issues, please make sure to ALWAYS use a cooling pad with it, preferably with a gap between the bottom of your notebook and the fans from the cooling pad, with the fans on.
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My posts are my opinions and experiences from working in the tech industry
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