Thank you salasi! The fan for the processor was being hindered by a power cord. I also loaded the fail-safe settings for the bios, and now its all good and the temp idles at about 39-40c. Damn! this thing is fast, it's over 2GHz and has a gig of ram. All my computers have been hand-me-downs so they're no way near as powerful as this.

One drawback is it doesn't boot directly from a usb flash stick. It boots from a usb fdd, a usb CD-ROM or a usb zip drive, but not flash? It even has usb support for keyboard and mouse and usb legacy. This is good, this means at least Grub won't have any problems finding it, but I'll have to use a floppy, unless... I think I'm going to put my Fedora hard drives in, show my friend how nice his computer can look and feel (before taking my drives out and putting his 'Windows infested' drive back in). I should be able to use the desktop effects and everything.