I have installed Ubuntu 12.04 on my Sony Vaio and am getting some fairly excessive fan noise when running more processor-demanding tasks such as watching HD YouTube videos full-screen, Skyping, etc. This does not occur under Windows 7 unless I'm doing something like playing Skyrim with high effects enabled.

Some background: I am unable to properly install the proprietary graphics drivers. Through Googling I came to understand that disabling the discrete ATI graphics card would improve this fan issue. Indeed, I followed instructions to do this and it does seem to alleviate the problem somewhat. It also seems that suspending the computer makes the issue worse (in other words, the same CPU load creates more fan noise after waking the computer ).

Any ideas, or am I just stuck with a noisy beast?

Thanks in advance!