Compaq LTE 5000 series, slightly OT (was: Re: Xircom NICs (was RE: OT: DELL SUCKS! Re: .... ))

From: Tothwolf <tothwolf_at_concentric.net>
Date: Sun Jan 13 22:03:15 2002

On Sun, 13 Jan 2002, Richard Erlacher wrote:

> I liked the looks of those dual PC-cards, and their apparent
> robustness. My Toshiba notebook took 4 PC cards and would allow me to
> use my SCSI adapter with two PC cards already in the system. My
> WInbook, however, has only two PC-card slots, and it's often enough
> that I do need the SCSI adapter, but need one but not both of the two
> functions. That's why I bought separate PC cards. The modem in the
> Toshiba was a PC Card with that "X-Jack" that worked pretty well, but
> one always worried about breaking it. The dongles are just as
> fragile, however.

While not quite yet a classic, one of my more favorite series of laptops
is the Compaq LTE 5000. It supported a total of 4 pcmcia cards when it was
used with a docking station. These were truly unique machines IMHO, and
set the standards for removable cdrom and floppy drives in future laptop
systems. I don't know of any other manufacturer at the time who offered a
machine with similar features.

The 5000 series consisted of models from the 5000 to the 5400. They were
beige in color, like the earlier LTE laptops offered by Compaq, and are
still distinct today. All of the 5000 series laptops were mid range
Pentium systems, with the 5400 topping out at 150MHz. The 5400 had 512k of
cpu cache, the rest had 256k. Ram wise, the 5400 topped out at 80MB (16MB
built-in and 64MB module), with most topping out at 72MB (only 8MB was
built-in.)

The multi-bay feature was a big selling point for these laptops. You could
remove the floppy or cdrom drive from the laptop's multi-bay, and put in a
second battery for extended road trips. The docking stations had two more
multi-bays, so when docked, a total of 3 were available.

The MPEG capture/playback module is still a unique feature of the 5000
series. It was a rectangular box with connectors on the rear that plugged
into the laptop's expansion connector. It would also fit into a special
opening on the docking stations.

I haven't yet seen another docking station that offers a MIDI/joystick
port. The docking station also had an ISA slot, and one of the two models
had built-in speakers for audio playback. The amplifier circuit for the
built-in speakers was prone to picking up noise from the data bus,
however.

Even with all the extras, this laptop line still had some serious
limitations which kept it from becoming as popular as it could have been.
It only offered 16 bit pcmcia card support instead of the 32 bit cardbus
that was available on other laptops at the time. Only 1MB of video ram was
available, with no way to expand it. The BIOS of these machine is also
quite buggy. Compaq never did fix the BIOS bugs, and I doubt they ever
will, since the product line is abandoned now.

-Toth
Received on Sun Jan 13 2002 - 22:03:15 GMT