Downloaded a program called i8kfangui, which is written for Dell laptops. It connects to the power management system and lets you monitor and control the fans, and also shows the temperature of the various components. I found that with the default BIOS settings, even when idle, the GPU temperature crept up to 78 degrees, at which point the fan would cut in and the temperature would drop. I've used the program to override the settings and run the GPU fan at low speeds all the time which keeps the temperature down to 47-50 degrees. Anything more than 50 and the fan runs at maximum. I haven't run Spore yet but Second Life is quite hard on the system and the video never rose above 60 degrees.
This obviously puts more wear on the fans but they are much cheaper to replace than the expensive processor or graphics card. Also if you want to, the program can just set the fans to run at full speed, which is noisy but at least the machine's got some beefy speakers...
It's apparently quite easy to upgrade this machine to a Core 2 Duo which is more efficient and can also run 64-bit operating systems. Not much point in that though because the motherboard has some limitations so that if you put 4gb RAM in, it'll only see 3.25gb regardless of the CPU or operating system.
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