This is a stock Dell machine so I'm not too concerned about heat off the start, but I will start monitoring it before I start overclocking or anything weird, the warranty transferred fine, the guy has only had it six months, he overbought so he picked up a much sleeker more appropriate one for himself and was trying to get rid of this one, the machine is mint, I really got a good deal. He's a real gadget guy, not geek but gadget, so I'm guessing the bank budget was tight and he went for the most expensive bit he had to get rid of.
And actually this isn't technically a 'quad core' it's a slap dash hybrid Intel threw together before AMD drops their quad core chips. I hear nothing but rave reviews though for maximum performance you need to set processor affinity a bit. It's two core 2 duo chips on the same die. So it's two separate core 2 duos together. Yes, it's 64 bit but what's the big deal? Games and software are by large and far 32 bit. I"m going to give Vista a good try (It's service pack 1 now so it's worth a shot) I dragged and dropped =) my TV tuner from the old machine to the new one and Vista chewed it up and spit out TV inside of the time it took to download the guide data, it also plug and played my monitor, keyboard and mouse flawlessly. It's a good start at least.
I want to stay on the good side of the law so to speak. I really want to try Vista though, but I still have a copy of XP Pro with a legal license to fall back on, it's for 1-2 processors though I'm not sure how that works out with multi core chips.