G1S - temperatures, noise and controlling fan speeds?

I'm overall extremely satisfied with the Asus G1S-A1 I've had for the last week (my first laptop), but while you would be hard pressed to actually call it noisy, I do notice that fan speed(s) (not sure if there's one on both the CPU and the GPU as in a desktop system?) often tend to vary somewhat, spinning up for a short while if there's just a little extra CPU load (we're talking 10-20% at the most).
I should note of course that I've got the laptop plugged in - in fact I haven't even tried it on battery yet , I bought it mostly as a desktop replacement.

I'm extremely sensitive to noise, and while a steady hum from the fans doesn't seem to bother me much, I'm not quite as pleased with these ups and downs when I'm merely doing simple things like surfing the web (admittely usually with 30+ tabs open in two Opera windows) or browsing files in Explorer.

I've also noticed that apparantly the sidebar (where I've got some fairly useful gadgets loaded) occasionally seem to be the culprit, at least in terms of short, small, but frequent bursts of extra CPU activity - and thus extra fan noise, while at other times it doesn't seem to cause these extra loads. I haven't really been able to narrow it down to any particular gadget.

Is there anything I can do to minimize the fan noise issue? Perhaps a utility to lock it at a certain speed?
And since something like that could of course be a problem in terms of temperatures, which program do people usually use to monitor those on an Asus laptop?
There is an Asus utility called NB Probe, but it merely lists a "normal" for temperature and fan speed.

I've just been playing around with the Windows power plans while I've been writing this, and it look like customizing a profile where CPU performance is limited to around 50-70% might keep the noise at a lower level.
Still interested in hearing about the other options though.

 

I think limiting CPU speed is your best option. You can create a Quiet profile for office work, and a Performance profile for, well yeah, performance

The G1S has just 1 fan I believe.

Also, sometimes newer BIOSes change fan policies. But the G1S runs pretty hot so I don't think a BIOS update would solve your issue.

In any case, make sure you are running updated ACPI drivers.

 

Well, it does look like limiting the max CPU use to 60% pretty much solved the problem - overall noise level is audibly lower and there appears to be much fewer "spin ups", and when they occasionally come they aren't as loud.

And fortunately it looks like 60% CPU power is more than enough for just about anything but gaming or other extremely processor intensive tasks.
I was able to play 1280x720 HD DivX videos without problem.

 

Oh, sure, even 1GHz will be more than sufficient for most tasks.

(the % in Vista are misleading, the CPU cannot actually clock down using the multiplier below a certain % which is usually not less than 40% of the max speed. I think Santa Rosa can use FSB to downclock but I'm not sure that feature is being used)