The new laptop is doing well so far, though I haven't used it for more than writing notes just yet.  However, I'm finding that the placement of the home, end, pgup and pgdown buttons makes it very hard to code on.  For some reason I can't fathom someone put keys that only work for web-browser forward/backward right next to the most commonly used navigation buttons on the keyboard (the inverted-T arrows).  The designer obviously knew the arrow keys are heavily used and important (there's grooves in the case for guiding your fingers to them), but didn't clue into the fact that home/end/pgup/pgdown needs to be easily struck when "home" on the arrows.

If I can manage it, I'll map the keys to the same arrangement as Soni's laptop, i.e. with the "Fn" key the two keys would be home/end and without it they'll be pgup/pgdown.  That's not ideal, but it's familiar enough that I could work with it.

[Update] There's a utility called xmodmap that makes the basic remapping easy, you need to call this to remap the forward/backward buttons on the Lenovo Thinkpad W500 into pageup/pagedown:

#! /bin/sh
# web-forward key as PgDn
xmodmap -e "keycode 167 = Next"
# web-backward key as PgUp
xmodmap -e "keycode 166 = Prior"
# Fn-Left-Arrow (previous track) as Home
xmodmap -e "keycode 173 = Home"
# Fn-Right-Arrow (next track) as End
xmodmap -e "keycode 171 = End" 
# Map F1 to escape (since f1 is where escape should be)
xmodmap -e "keycode 67 = Escape XF86_Switch_VT_1 F1 XF86_Switch_VT_1 F1 XF86_Switch_VT_1"

Create an executable script with those operations, then go to the KDE 4 settings window, click "Advanced" and "Autostart" then choose the script (use a link).  Next time you log in you'll have PgUp/PgDn on the forward/back buttons.

That's not quite the same bindings as the Lenovo C3000 (Soni's laptop), but it's close enough that I should be able to work reasonably on the machine.