Hello everyone, I'm a first time poster here, and I'm brand new to Linux, but some friends of mine all say it's great, and after researching it I'm eager to put it on my home built Duron machine.

I have the ISOs off all three Mandrake 10.1 discs downloaded, now I need help with what to do from here. I tried burning them as bootable discs in Nero and installing them, but it didn't work, my PC skipped over the CD drive, loaded up some stuff I didn't recognize like USB drivers from the motherboard and then asked me to specify a location on Drive A, my floppy drive (no floppy was inserted and yes, my CD drive is set to be the first boot device). I also tried just burning a regular data disc with the ISO on it, still didn't work. At this point I'm convinced I'm burning it wrong, what do I do?

You need to select create from CD image
http://www.linuxiso.org/viewdoc.php/neroburning.html

Once the CDs are burned verify that they contain files and directories not just a single ISO file.

And welcome to LinuxQuestions

I think that you have burned the CDs wrong, too.
The Mandrake Installation is one of the easiest.
I also burned it through Nero then. After this you only have to setup your ROM-Drive
to boot (in the BIOS) and the installation will start without any problems.

Thank you both, I'm gonna go try it out.

EDIT: ok it started up and began to install, curretnly I'm at a plain black screen with the words, "Proceeding, please wait...." It's been on there quite a while now, is that normal?