I just got my Compaq Presario 900Z today (10/21) after ordering 1 week ago on 10/13. It's totally cool! My last laptop was a PowerBook 150 in 1996 and this 900Z totally blows it out of the water.
[*]I got the 15" SXGA screen. Wow, 1400x1050 is so many pixels! There's only one bad pixel in the upper right corner of the screen, and I'm ok with it. When I first booted up, ClearType was enabled in XP and it made text look kind of blurry, but once I turned that off, it was awesome (ClearType is a real personal preference -- I just like to see pixels on my screens)
[*]The keyboard is really nice because the keys aren't hard to press. I was afraid of buying a laptop without trying the keyboard, but this keyboard is very smooth. Every bit as good as my friend's Dell Inspiron 8100 keyboard. One interesting thing on the keyboard is that it has two physical keys to type backslash (or the vertical pipe, when shifted). This is nice because I'm so used to it near Enter. Alt and Ctrl are kind of small, but I guess that's to be expected. One thing I'll have to get used to is finding Fn at the bottom-left corner instead of Ctrl, which I'm always expecting there. It's very nice that cursor keys are in the standard inverted-T formation.
[*]The trackpad is a bit hard to get used to, probably because I'm used to my old PowerBook trackball. I think most people will want to use a mouse if you're going to use the pointing device for more than 10 minutes. One improvement I did was to disable the pad-tap feature in the control panel so that I don't accidentally do a single-click by tapping the pad. One thing to note is that there aren't click buttons above the trackpad, only below (some people may like buttons above).
[*]There's a special 4-way scroll thingy (I'm guessing to have somewhat the effectiveness of a mouse wheel). Seems like it may be controlled via proprietary software which might not be great (I can't stand tons of proprietary stuff that becomes unsupported over time. For goodness sakes people, leave the driver writing stuff to Microsoft [note: I work for MS in my day job ]).
[*]I tried running SETI@home on it for a while and, yes, the fan did turn on, but no hangs/crashes at all, so I'm happy with that.
[*]The palmrest does get somewhat warm, but not uncomfortably. The bottom is somewhat warmer than that, but not uncomfortable (not 140 degrees ). I used it on my lap to write this message.
[*]Overall, the laptop has a very high quality, refined and polished feel to it. Very stylish too.
For $1020 (after coupon, free shipping, tax, and rebate) I'm very happy.
RossMAN, if your 1500T is anything close to this, you should be dancing in the streets for the Ferengi Grand Nagus deal you got.
Spencer