rusheto,

Try the hard reset procedure described here.

It seems an odd failure that shift keys wouldn't work on a brand new portable right out of the box. Stranger things have happened though. If they don't work in the diagnostics then it would seem they're indeed nonfunctional. The only other thing I'd recommend trying is booting to the Resource CD or OS CD that came with your system, go to a command prompt & see if you can type capital letters there using the shift key(s).