If it's mostly the 2am noise that bothers you, the first thing you might try is turn off whatever is scheduled at that time. Popular offenders are prelinking and manpage indexing but there are many other possibilities. Turn them off or move them to say 10am in the morning when no one is around.
You can also try out powertop (from intel) which is intended to find things that use a lot of power. Those things also of course tend to make the cpu run hotter and start up the fans as well. If you do enough plus some power settings, you can even get to the point where the machine goes to sleep when not used. -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group Mailing List - http://slug.org.au/ Subscription info and FAQs: http://slug.org.au/faq/mailinglists.html
