inspiron 5150 overheating FC2

I have given up trying to figure out ACPI, cpuspeed, cpufreq and all that jazz which allows a laptop to function normally. Everything seemed alright for a time, although the fan was constantly at high speed - not on Windows XP though, the machine was always quiet on XP. Then the computer kept overheating and cutting out. To resolve this I eventually disabled Speedstep in the BIOS and it has been fine since. I assume that the computer should work better with speedstep so I need to look at cpufreq daemon.