When I used a laptop, I had a lot of mods, MCCC included, and my laptop didn't run any hotter or slower because of them. Unsure why yours is doing that, but it shouldn't make that much of a difference.
To handle story progression without a mod, you'll have to go into each household individually and either play out their progression or use cheats to do it. I use cheats to add progression for minor households in my game by artificially increasing their career level, their skill levels, maybe add new skills, add a kid to the household and age them up, etc. Just so they're all caught up, and I don't have to play out all that progress myself.
