If I had to guess he has an old sony vaio series of laptops that had a problem with the fans not slowing down ever. There was a firmware fix for it a while ago.

If I had to guess he has an old sony vaio series of laptops that had a problem with the fans not slowing down ever. There was a firmware fix for it a while ago. If there is not a problem with that then I would guess that the laptop has high cpu utilization warranting the fan speed increase. Seriously though you should get a linode account and let them handle the sound/power/bandwidth costs. 20$ a month and you can leave it on.