ms. birdstrike's Sony VAIO fan was howling, so I cleaned the dust from the vents and it calmed right down. I then installed
SpeedFan and checked the temp on the CPU. 73C.
I then installed SpeedFan on my 3GHz P4 and found it to be running at 127C (no dust inside this one!).
SpeedFan is a cool little utility that displays the output of many internal sensors I only generally knew existed.
How hot does your machine run?