Well, impressively I have my compaq presario laptop back and fixed. They sent me a box for it monday, I got that tuesday and shipped it out, they got the laptop thursday, fixed it and shipped it back out priority overnight. I got it friday morning. Popped the drive back in and I was all up and running again.
They replaced the system board and the LCD apparently. I did loose all my stickers that were on the LCD, but a small price to pay, especially since I am just going to sell this laptop off when the thinkpad arrives.
It’s amazing how there’s a mental shift. When I started using the presario again there was about 15minutes of disorentation since I had been using the 1024×600 portege with a pointing stick, and was back to the 1600×1200 trackpad presario. Life’s much better at 1600×1200. 
Now, if I could just get a ship date from ibm on the thinkpad.
