1) Replace your hard drive with an SSD.
2) Get software that monitors things like internal temps and fan speed. I use conky (
Conky - Home ), but that might Linux only. Then if you have noise &c, but your fan's not running, you'll know the fan's not the problem.
3) You could easily have a lot of crud inside the laptop that's interfering with cooling. Only way to tell is to open it up and look. Blowing things out with air helps, but it's not 100%
4) All laptops don't get hot, at least not all the time. A lot depends on what you're doing with them. For instance, mine is sitting at 118 F (2% CPU, fan off) as I'm just doing web browsing.
You might be able to cut CPU/power utilization, and thus heat, with something like PowerTop (
https://01.org/powertop - again, probably Linux only). Most computers come with a lot of things enabled by default, that you may not need or want.