Picked up my new laptop today. It is busted. The most obvious symptom is that the touchpad doesn’t work, and it reboots at odd moments, too.
I suspect a memory problem, but I’m not going to put too much effort into tracking it down, because H-P have committed to replacing the entire machine. The dealer kindly loaned me a USB mouse until the new machine comes, which works around the touchpad problem.
The upside of all this is that I now have a machine that I can freely trash over the course of the next week. I intend to do this by trying any and every software package I can lay my greedy little hands on.