I use this laptop for video/audio editing, gaming (TF2, E.Y.E., L4D2, Eve Online, used to play CoH and CoV - all of these I would play in stereoscopic 3D via iz3d driver) and my laptop CPU has NEVER run at 100% like this except when running pooler's cpuminer.
I say it's worse because, if the code is clean and it is driving my cpu to 100% when I can normally run 8 - 10 *coin clients at any given time at less than 10% cpu usage, then it is obviously VERY poorly coded.
Technically no. Unless you have multiple cores or you use pooler's webminer.
For cpuminer, if you have multiple cores, the "-t" flag will allow you set to set the number of cores (threads) you desire to use.
For the webminer you can actually define a percentage value.