I work in a business centre with 60 or so small businesses. I help people from time to time when they are in dire straits with there computers. Excluding hardware, 100% of the problems in the last 5 years have turned out to be with Norton Internet Security. I simply cannot understand why people run this application.

Many laptops are shipped with the distribution on a partition on the hard drive, this maybe the case for your HP. I think all are shipped either with the distribution on the hard drive or on CD/DVD.