For long time I had my laptop running rather hot. The problem was that BIOS was handling the cooling and not so well. First I tried loading i8kfan module but it crashed the whole machine. Finally I found dellfand utility which allows the user to control fan speed. Altough my DELL Studio 1535 wasn't listed in the supported models list it still worked.

First I downloaded dependencies on my Ubuntu install:

sudo apt-get install build-essential

Then compiled the program since it wasn't available in the APT repositories:

wget -c http://dellfand.dinglisch.net/dellfand-0.9.tar.bz2
tar xvf dellfand-0.9.tar.bz2
cd dellfand-0.9
make
sudo cp dellfand /usr/local/bin

Finally started it up with following parameters:

sudo dellfand 1 10 25 30 35

The cooling has three modes - turned off, low speed, max speed. In this case the fan is turned off 25-30C, in low mode 30-35C and at max speed when the temperature raises over 35C. More information here .