[CentOS] Overheating on laptop as compared to RHEL

Hi,
 I have an acer 5738g laptop on which i tried out the centos6.4 live CD.
The laptop feels noticable hotter and i check the temperature using
something like cat /proc/acpi/thermal_zone/. The temperatures are around
57-60 degrees when the laptop is just idling, ie, just the desktop and the
terminal window open. I install lm_sensors using yum and it installs
successfully, but there is no noticable reduction in temperature. I have
faced this same problem using different varities of gnu/linux
distributions: slackware, lubuntu, mandriva and now centos. By a freak
chance, i had a chance to run RHEL 5.4 and to my great surprise, the
temperature at idling was 43, similar to Windows(which came as default). In
fact, the temperature control by rhel was what made me think of trying
centos. I tried the lm_sensors configuration on rhel and it was not even
able to load the correct modules, yet the temperature control was better.
Now, i am not sure if lmsensors are for detecting temperatures only but
also for cotrolling temperature.
I am also aware that this particular model is notorious for heating
problems, and there are suggestions for cutting case for better air flow.
However, i do not want to try this solution, but the temperature control
by rhel gave me some hope! Posibly i am wrong.
If anyone has a suggestion, or needs more information, pl. let me know.
Thanks!
Krishnan