New 1500 consistently hangs, doesn't respond.

Got my referb Vostro 1500 today.
Got it home, pluged it in, turned it on.
It took a long time to boot the first time, it does the finishing of the install.
But it was even slower then it should have been, this is where the problem started.

Clicking on things didn’t work, the mouse moves, but clicking next didn’t move it forward. After 3-5 minutes, it would go forward. After continually doing this all through the rest of the install and after I got into the desktop, it does this virtually all the time. It locks up for a short time, then starts responding for a short time before locking up again.

I’ve tried uninstalling a bunch of stuff, hasn’t worked so far.

The other thing that happened was, once the install finished and went to the desktop, after a little while it bluescreened with an internal power error. It hasn’t done this since that first time, but it’s my only clue as to what is going on.

I’ve also tried disabling restore, network connections, didn’t help.

The thing is real quite and has a great screen, so I’d like to keep it if possible.
I was planning on going to XP anyway but I’d like to know what’s going on before I try that. Hopefully it’s not a hardware problem.

 

What happens in safe-mode?