frequent laptop fan use

[mgh520]

I wasn't sure where to post this, but newbie seems as good as any since I'm brand-new to Mint.

I recently switched from Gentoo to Mint 8 and I've been very happy with Mint thus far. There is one issue I've been unable to solve. Compared to Gentoo (and Arch before that and Debian before that), my Compaq laptop fan seems to run almost constantly with Mint and the laptop stays quite warm. Even if the computer is idle and only my screensaver is on (just screen blanking, nothing fancy), the fan still frequently comes on.

I looked through the processes that are running for things like Beagle that might be working even when I'm not, but nothing jumped out at me. I also disabled compiz and all desktop effects just in case that could be the cause.

I'm using the "ondemand" cpufreq setting and I'm running Gnome. My laptop is probably 5 years old, but as I said - other distros didn't run it so hot and they were Gnome as well. My guess is that something is running in the background. I haven't really installed much else besides the base distro - I'm not running a webserver or anything off of this, just a basic desktop machine. Any thoughts on what it could be or other things I can try to diagnose this?

thanks!

[jesica]

sorry I am sure you can fix is in a terminal, and I would love to know how, because my eeepc does the same, but I know you get these funky fan docking stations you can use that brings the heat down

[mgh520]

Not sure if this will help anyone else, but for me at least, it appears this issue was mostly caused by my wireless on this Compaq Presario V2000 laptop. I had not been using wireless before, so that's why it was never an issue and the switch to Mint and wireless happened about the same time.
I went into Windows (this machine is dual-boot), and it was even worse -- an ran at top speed almost constantly.
Now, with wireless disabled, the laptop is running much cooler and the fan comes on much less frequently. Thanks.