Pls need advice - is this a hardware issue?

I bought a HP 8510p the other week, and it's acting rather strange. I've had 2 blue-screens, both with strange gfx glitches - the first will a kind of "shadow" image of the blue-screen text, the second had a red square in the corner (see bluescreen image attached, which of course is a mockup ).

The other weirdness is sometimes the mouse cursor becomes corrupted in various ways - see second attached image which is a mockup of the corrupted mouse cursor. It reminds me of bad programming on a Commodore 64.

I've also had 2 sudden "warm boots", as if on a PC someone hit the reset button. No warning or errors, I was just typing something and the screen goes black, then boots right from the POST screen.

I'm wondering if this all ads up to a hardware issue, perhaps with RAM, motherboard or gfx card? Or can driver issues also produce these effects? How could I help determine if it's a hardware faults before calling HP service? I've always run Avast a/v & Kerio firewall, it's a fairly fresh XP SP2 install, definitely not infected with anything. I've tried reinstalling the system drivers, ATI drivers, everything looks perfectly ok driver-wise.

Any advice appreciated. Are there some good hardware testing apps I could run that would definitely tell me if the hardware was at fault?

 

Sounds kind of like a bad vid card but not sure. You may want to try new drivers first to see if that solves the issue.

 

Is there are GPU testing utility I can run to give it a good stress test?

 

Ati Tool has a artifact tester. Run that for about 10-20 mins.