But there's a nasty side-effect of the proprietary
driver - the system
seems to freeze for a few seconds every once in a while (about once a
day).
There are no side-effects of the open source driver, but i don't know
how to tell it to work in dual-head mode and i don't know how to silence
the fan.
Often this sort of problem is APM or ACPI related. You could try turning
all power management stuff off in the BIOS and disable it in the kernel
boot parameters and see if that helps.
HTH