Slow-running, loud fan on Toshiba Equium A60

Hi guys,

Not a huge problem, but it's annoying me and I have very little knowledge about these things.

I have a Toshiba laptop. It's an A60 Equium.
Mobile Intel
Pentium 4 CPU 3.06Ghz
3.07Ghz, 448 MB of RAM

It seems to be running quite slow and the whirring (which I presume is the fan) sounds like it's reeeeally working hard, even with no applications open. I think it's a 40Gb machine and I have about 20Gb of music on it, plus word documents and maybe 3,500 emails on Outlook Express.

I've done a disk clean-up and was going to defrag but it said I didn't need to. It's clean of viruses and spyware and adware.

Is this just what happens to laptops after 6 months or is there something I can do?

Any advice would be appreciated,

Thanks!