I doubt you melted a Celeron D CPU. My friend, which nearly the exact same specifications as you plays Battlefield 2, FEAR, watches videos, browses the internet, chats, and does many other things that use up the CPU usage.
I bet it's the way your CPU is being cooled. Although I still find it hard for a CPU to die purly because of your cooling system, because today's CPUs come with heatsinks and fans, and I for one thing definetly know how well CPU coolers work. My old case had NO fans in it, yet it cooled a Radeon X700, 1 gigabyte of RAM, a 2.8GHz Pentium 4, two hard drives, a CD drive and a DVD drive.
However you managed to destroy the CPU certainly wasn't from loading ADOBE Photoshop 7.0, but from somethign entirly different. My guess is that you were majorly multitasking, and by that I'm speaking of 15+ programs running at the same time. A good way to overload a CPU is to play music, use a graphics intensive program, covert an extension format, compile a program, surf the internet, use simultanious messaging programs, and have a game running, nothing hardcore, something like pinball or something.
But even despite all that a Celeron D can infact take it on, because it does use HyperThreading technology and has 64-bit support, good for multitasking.
But even if you managed to overload the CPU, the motherboard, or the CPU automatically shuts the CPU down at a certain temperature. So with that said I doubt it was the processor, but possibly a bad motherboard, one that doesn't sense the CPU temperature and doesn't have the ability to automatically shut it down.
Whatever the case may be, the Celeron D may not be the best of all processors, but it certainly can do many things. It
CAN play games, it
CAN multitask, it can do anything you want it to, it's a processor, it may not be anythign like an AMD Athelon64 or a Pentium Extreme Edition, but it is a good CPU depending on what you want it to do. Because it accomponied with good parts, can produce good results.