Richard, that is some serious hardware, i looked at a VERY similar version before buying mine, nice bit of kit and the screen is beauitful! Having built pcs & laptops as a job for two years i have seen many!!!
HP are among the best, the build quality is second only to toshiba, the aftersales is very good and the drivers are updated regularly! My personal laptop is HP, as is my business laptop, both are great and have behaved flawlessly!
TIPS_
Out the box it runs great, but ASAP goto the HP site and make sure you have the most recent drivers!
www.hp.com
Reset the vitural memory to min768/max1024 as HP oftern have this set at random values (or worse still they let windows determin it)
Disable remote access which will be enabled as default.
The ATI card onboard is good and a recent generation but still needs the right drivers, this will enable your games to run that much more smoothly. ATI's site or HP should have the most recent.
Get rid of the nasty HP "help suite" or whatever its called these days, its known for being useless and taking up space!
Also- your laptop may of come with norton installed, this is a good thing BUT if not setup correctly will hinder system performance noticably. I could write an entire thread on this so the long and the short is go through the options/maunual and config it yourself, forward known ports and block unused ports.
Run regedit.exe and remove unwanted programs (like HP suite) from startup. My laptop boots from cold to XP in 22secs, yours should be quicker than this once these mods are done.
Check to see if your drive is using NTFC not FAT32 format as the latter is very old and doesnt work well with XP.
If you know all this already please forgive me, i dont mean to be patronising. If you dont these should really speed up your laptop, think of it like "tuning" a car engine. If you dont understand anything or want a more detailed step by step instruction sheet then just let me know, ill be happy to help!