Laptop Compaq LTE 5000, part one - acquaintance
When I was attacked by a nostalgia attack, one of the thoughts was that the retro technology takes quite a lot of space. While I’m at work with her, it’s not scary, three or four superfluous system makers in the warehouse will not take up much space. But at home space is limited and did not want to litter his computers, which are included in the mood. Therefore, the question arose - what exactly do you want from a retro computer that will be on hand, what age it should be, etc.?
First, compactness. Or a small desktop or laptop. The desktop is more flexible in terms of hardware configuration, but also larger. And the process itself “took out the case, the mouse, the keyboard, connected it to the monitor, played for five minutes, put it away” would be very tedious. Therefore I decided to look towards laptops. The process of their inclusion is much easier and faster than unfolding the desktop.
So the laptop.
')
The picture is not my laptop and LTE 5000 .
Secondly, it was necessary to determine the goals for which I need a retro computer at home. The hardware configuration that had to be searched depended on it. I thought about it and decided that I wanted to have a hardware launch of the DOS games of the beginning and mid-nineties. As for the games of the eighties, I have no particular nostalgia, the games of the late nineties were mostly under windows and often even run on modern operating systems without problems. In the gray zone are the games that used glide, but I was ready to sacrifice them in this matter. Because I don't remember laptops with 3dfx, and compactness was more important to me here. So I decided to leave glide for desktops and emulators, the benefit of software implementations is not so little appeared.
Total - need a laptop for DOS-games. Well maybe early windows games that don't require a 3D accelerator. What kind of laptop should it be?
Senior 486 or early Pentium. At 386, something could not start or slow down, but too quickly in this matter is also bad. Therefore, it’s best to be somewhere in the middle of productivity.
“640 kilobytes is enough for everyone” (s) is attributed to Bill Gates.
The size of RAM was not too important for games under DOS, 8-16 megabytes of RAM for games of those days was behind the eyes. More problems were with the base memory, which all resident programs liked to survive. Just within those 640 kilobytes.
Of course, the concept of fast and slow video cards existed even then, ET6000 were not popular out of the blue. But to choose a laptop of those years on the video card makes no special sense that they put it - they put it. Other options are more important.
There was already more choice. Monochrome immediately threw back. Of course, I saw people who were playing Color Lines on a black and white monitor, but the pleasure of this process was beyond my comprehension. Although, of course, I received my portion of games on a black and white monitor, my friend was playing UFO1 on a monochrome 12 "monitor. But I don’t want to repeat, because only color. But there was a question about the type of matrix. It’s all TN, IPS, PVA , PLS, OLED, etc. In those days, these words did not know, there were two main types of matrices - passive (STN) and active (TFT). I will not talk about the differences, I can only say that the images on passive matrices dynamically looked very bad - plumes behind objects, disappearance of small objects when moving (tick "turn tail mouse cursor "in windows just grows from there), when changing the picture, the brightness could fall. And if it was still tolerable for a text editor, then it was okay to play such a screen except chess. Therefore, you should not consider a passive matrix for games .
Passive matrix and its comparison with the active:
Screen resolution is also important. It is today the more the better. And at the time, the problem with LCD displays was that they practically could not scale the image. Not that they did it badly, but simply did not know how. Because when you run dosovskih applications on LCD screens, you had a frame around the edges. Most often black, but sometimes in other colors. And the greater the screen resolution, the greater will be these frames. So the ideal option would be a screen with a resolution of 640x480, for it the dosovsky 320x200 could be increased by simply doubling the pixels, the brains of the then screens were enough for that. But at the resolutions of the matrix 800x600 and 1024x768 you received the same framework.
First, the sound card should have been. Of course, they also played with the speaker, but still the installation of a “soundblaster” was obligatory for a cool gaming computer. Only in the second half of the nineties the presence of at least some zvukovushka became implied by default. Secondly, the sound should be hardware compatible with Sound Blaster. Well, or at least with Adlib at worst - to work normally in DOS. In laptops designed for Windows 98 (Pentium MMX, Pentium II) they could already install incompatible chips that needed to load drivers, which could take away memory from those 640 kilobytes.
Total: for complete happiness, you had to look for something like 486dx4 / Pentium, 16MB RAM, 640x480 TFT, Sound Blaster compatible.
When I started searching, I came across a clip on YouTube , where it was described (and shown) in a somewhat more detailed way that I described above.
At the same time, specific notebook models were recommended there, which were worth paying attention to. Well, or not to pay. For example, it was said that it is almost impossible to find a laptop on a 486 processor with a built-in sound card. As an option, it was suggested to stick Cowox and his relatives in the LPT, but I didn’t want to pervert so much - we also need to connect the speakers to them. But there were also proposed versions of laptops on Pentium - Compaq, LTE 5000 series and Toshiba 4xxCDT. Compaq LTE 5000 (Pentium 75 / 640x480TFT) and Toshiba 400CDT (Pentium 75 / 640x480TFT) were called ideal.
The author of the video himself said that the ideal is difficult to achieve and he did not manage to find these specific models for reasonable money even in their own America - a country where people for 10 bucks buy a box of sync points at a garage sale. What can we say about the Russian province.
But a couple of lost auctions on ebay and tracking Avito brought me the Compaq LTE 5200 in a fairly decent condition and for quite reasonable money. Not 20 bucks, as the author of the video, but not 30 thousand, who want for such a laptop under the sauce that it can be used to change the firmware in McLaren F1 . True, I had to go to Moscow, but there I still happen quite regularly.
Model: Compaq LTE 5200
Processor: Intel Pentium 120Mhz
RAM memory: 72 MB
HDD: 1.3 GB, Toshiba, IDE (maximum capacity - 8 gigabytes).
Screen: 10.4 "TFT, 800x600x16 bit
Ports: LPT, COM, PS / 2, IrDA, VGA, microphone, headphones / speakers, docking port
PCMCIA: 2 typeII / I ports or one typeIII.
Sound card: ES1688
Video Card: Cirrus 7543, 1MB Video DRAM
FDD: 3.5 "1.44MB.
CD-ROM: Internal 3.5-inch, 6x CD-ROM Drive (interchangeable with FDD, optional)
Dimensions: 310 x 228 x 52.5 mm, weight 3.35 kg with battery
Battery: NiMH 12V, 2500mah
The laptop is white. Well, rather white. Almost yellowed. Either well washed. From above only the name of the manufacturer and model.
Below is an information board, a CMOS battery compartment and a hard disk latch, which I constantly forget about when I try to remove a disk.
At the front we have a 3.5 "drive (removable, a CD-ROM is also placed there), a hard drive compartment and a battery - also quick-detachable.
If you take everything out, the laptop looks like this. It practically turns out to be empty, the boards with his “sandwich” in the screen area are located.
Behind on the right is the IR port window, PS / 2 port (one but universal), audio connectors and a power connector.
If you open the "window", it opens the connector for connecting the docking station.
And if you open the whole door, the ports COM, LPT and VGA become available.
On the right is the latch of the laptop cover, the battery removal lever and the PCMCIA card cover.
Inside the compartment.
On the left is another cover latch, a lever for removing the drive, a volume control (wheel), a microphone jack and a fan. It does not work all the time, but when it works, it makes quite a loud noise.
Drives, hard drive and battery (or rather only the body).
Drive connectors.
Hard disk connector. The previous owner said that his rare disk format.
But in reality it’s just a container.
Inside it is a simple 2.5 "IDE disk and a completely standard connector.
Disk.
Disk on the background of the modern pyatisotki
Now you can open. By the way, the test for opening with one hand laptop fails with a bang. He has two latches on both sides - so open strictly only with two hands. The sign of the active matrix is the only brightness control. The passive matrix usually had two adjustments, brightness and contrast.
Keyboard. In girlhood, it seems, was German. Pointer - trackpoint. I never liked them, I like the touchpads much more. Well, or trackballs, if we talk about old laptops.
In the corner there is a power button, a mechanical sensor for closing the lid (turns off the display) and the “Sleep” button. In principle, this laptop even supports hibernation at the BIOS level (but driver support is also needed). The only problem is that the BIOS knows only about FAT16, so when you try to use hibernation on FAT32, you can say goodbye to the file system. But simple sleep works fine.
Of the features - instead of the indicator LEDs there is a small LCD screen. When turned on, it lights some of the indicators. For example, a tap means energy saving mode. It also notes the activity of the drive and hard disk, the status of * Lock-keys (A - included Caps Lock), the charge level of two batteries (you can stick two batteries at the same time at the cost of giving up the drive).
A little bit of viscera, a laptop with the keyboard removed. It can be seen that a pair of LEDs is still there - power and battery charging. On the right is the battery compartment, on the left - for drives or a second battery. In the center of the hard drive compartment is covered. RAM is placed in the center from the top, to the left of it you can see the processor radiator.
Now you can turn on and go into the BIOS.
Bios is quite concise - a screen with information about the system and drop-down menus with a small number of settings on top. The processor of these laptops set from Pentium 75 to 150 and was amenable to replacement. It was mounted on a “cartridge” along with a small amount of RAM (8 or 16 megabytes), because the maximum memory size depended on the processor and could go up to 80 megabytes (16 “basic” plus an additional 64 megabyte module). In my case it costs 64 + 8 = 72. I don’t understand the point about the network card, because there is no RJ-45 connector on the laptop, it only had a docking station.
Well, finally you can boot into the operating system. But about her a separate item will be.
And in the next part I will talk about what I had to finish and mine for complete happiness.
First, compactness. Or a small desktop or laptop. The desktop is more flexible in terms of hardware configuration, but also larger. And the process itself “took out the case, the mouse, the keyboard, connected it to the monitor, played for five minutes, put it away” would be very tedious. Therefore I decided to look towards laptops. The process of their inclusion is much easier and faster than unfolding the desktop.
So the laptop.
')
The picture is not my laptop and LTE 5000 .
Secondly, it was necessary to determine the goals for which I need a retro computer at home. The hardware configuration that had to be searched depended on it. I thought about it and decided that I wanted to have a hardware launch of the DOS games of the beginning and mid-nineties. As for the games of the eighties, I have no particular nostalgia, the games of the late nineties were mostly under windows and often even run on modern operating systems without problems. In the gray zone are the games that used glide, but I was ready to sacrifice them in this matter. Because I don't remember laptops with 3dfx, and compactness was more important to me here. So I decided to leave glide for desktops and emulators, the benefit of software implementations is not so little appeared.
Total - need a laptop for DOS-games. Well maybe early windows games that don't require a 3D accelerator. What kind of laptop should it be?
Selection
CPU
Senior 486 or early Pentium. At 386, something could not start or slow down, but too quickly in this matter is also bad. Therefore, it’s best to be somewhere in the middle of productivity.
RAM
“640 kilobytes is enough for everyone” (s) is attributed to Bill Gates.
The size of RAM was not too important for games under DOS, 8-16 megabytes of RAM for games of those days was behind the eyes. More problems were with the base memory, which all resident programs liked to survive. Just within those 640 kilobytes.
Video card
Of course, the concept of fast and slow video cards existed even then, ET6000 were not popular out of the blue. But to choose a laptop of those years on the video card makes no special sense that they put it - they put it. Other options are more important.
Screen
There was already more choice. Monochrome immediately threw back. Of course, I saw people who were playing Color Lines on a black and white monitor, but the pleasure of this process was beyond my comprehension. Although, of course, I received my portion of games on a black and white monitor, my friend was playing UFO1 on a monochrome 12 "monitor. But I don’t want to repeat, because only color. But there was a question about the type of matrix. It’s all TN, IPS, PVA , PLS, OLED, etc. In those days, these words did not know, there were two main types of matrices - passive (STN) and active (TFT). I will not talk about the differences, I can only say that the images on passive matrices dynamically looked very bad - plumes behind objects, disappearance of small objects when moving (tick "turn tail mouse cursor "in windows just grows from there), when changing the picture, the brightness could fall. And if it was still tolerable for a text editor, then it was okay to play such a screen except chess. Therefore, you should not consider a passive matrix for games .
Passive matrix and its comparison with the active:
Screen resolution is also important. It is today the more the better. And at the time, the problem with LCD displays was that they practically could not scale the image. Not that they did it badly, but simply did not know how. Because when you run dosovskih applications on LCD screens, you had a frame around the edges. Most often black, but sometimes in other colors. And the greater the screen resolution, the greater will be these frames. So the ideal option would be a screen with a resolution of 640x480, for it the dosovsky 320x200 could be increased by simply doubling the pixels, the brains of the then screens were enough for that. But at the resolutions of the matrix 800x600 and 1024x768 you received the same framework.
Sound card
First, the sound card should have been. Of course, they also played with the speaker, but still the installation of a “soundblaster” was obligatory for a cool gaming computer. Only in the second half of the nineties the presence of at least some zvukovushka became implied by default. Secondly, the sound should be hardware compatible with Sound Blaster. Well, or at least with Adlib at worst - to work normally in DOS. In laptops designed for Windows 98 (Pentium MMX, Pentium II) they could already install incompatible chips that needed to load drivers, which could take away memory from those 640 kilobytes.
Total: for complete happiness, you had to look for something like 486dx4 / Pentium, 16MB RAM, 640x480 TFT, Sound Blaster compatible.
When I started searching, I came across a clip on YouTube , where it was described (and shown) in a somewhat more detailed way that I described above.
At the same time, specific notebook models were recommended there, which were worth paying attention to. Well, or not to pay. For example, it was said that it is almost impossible to find a laptop on a 486 processor with a built-in sound card. As an option, it was suggested to stick Cowox and his relatives in the LPT, but I didn’t want to pervert so much - we also need to connect the speakers to them. But there were also proposed versions of laptops on Pentium - Compaq, LTE 5000 series and Toshiba 4xxCDT. Compaq LTE 5000 (Pentium 75 / 640x480TFT) and Toshiba 400CDT (Pentium 75 / 640x480TFT) were called ideal.
The author of the video himself said that the ideal is difficult to achieve and he did not manage to find these specific models for reasonable money even in their own America - a country where people for 10 bucks buy a box of sync points at a garage sale. What can we say about the Russian province.
But a couple of lost auctions on ebay and tracking Avito brought me the Compaq LTE 5200 in a fairly decent condition and for quite reasonable money. Not 20 bucks, as the author of the video, but not 30 thousand, who want for such a laptop under the sauce that it can be used to change the firmware in McLaren F1 . True, I had to go to Moscow, but there I still happen quite regularly.
Performance characteristics and appearance
Model: Compaq LTE 5200
Processor: Intel Pentium 120Mhz
RAM memory: 72 MB
HDD: 1.3 GB, Toshiba, IDE (maximum capacity - 8 gigabytes).
Screen: 10.4 "TFT, 800x600x16 bit
Ports: LPT, COM, PS / 2, IrDA, VGA, microphone, headphones / speakers, docking port
PCMCIA: 2 typeII / I ports or one typeIII.
Sound card: ES1688
Video Card: Cirrus 7543, 1MB Video DRAM
FDD: 3.5 "1.44MB.
CD-ROM: Internal 3.5-inch, 6x CD-ROM Drive (interchangeable with FDD, optional)
Dimensions: 310 x 228 x 52.5 mm, weight 3.35 kg with battery
Battery: NiMH 12V, 2500mah
The laptop is white. Well, rather white. Almost yellowed. Either well washed. From above only the name of the manufacturer and model.
Below is an information board, a CMOS battery compartment and a hard disk latch, which I constantly forget about when I try to remove a disk.
At the front we have a 3.5 "drive (removable, a CD-ROM is also placed there), a hard drive compartment and a battery - also quick-detachable.
If you take everything out, the laptop looks like this. It practically turns out to be empty, the boards with his “sandwich” in the screen area are located.
Behind on the right is the IR port window, PS / 2 port (one but universal), audio connectors and a power connector.
If you open the "window", it opens the connector for connecting the docking station.
And if you open the whole door, the ports COM, LPT and VGA become available.
On the right is the latch of the laptop cover, the battery removal lever and the PCMCIA card cover.
Inside the compartment.
On the left is another cover latch, a lever for removing the drive, a volume control (wheel), a microphone jack and a fan. It does not work all the time, but when it works, it makes quite a loud noise.
Drives, hard drive and battery (or rather only the body).
Drive connectors.
Hard disk connector. The previous owner said that his rare disk format.
But in reality it’s just a container.
Inside it is a simple 2.5 "IDE disk and a completely standard connector.
Disk.
Disk on the background of the modern pyatisotki
Now you can open. By the way, the test for opening with one hand laptop fails with a bang. He has two latches on both sides - so open strictly only with two hands. The sign of the active matrix is the only brightness control. The passive matrix usually had two adjustments, brightness and contrast.
Keyboard. In girlhood, it seems, was German. Pointer - trackpoint. I never liked them, I like the touchpads much more. Well, or trackballs, if we talk about old laptops.
In the corner there is a power button, a mechanical sensor for closing the lid (turns off the display) and the “Sleep” button. In principle, this laptop even supports hibernation at the BIOS level (but driver support is also needed). The only problem is that the BIOS knows only about FAT16, so when you try to use hibernation on FAT32, you can say goodbye to the file system. But simple sleep works fine.
Of the features - instead of the indicator LEDs there is a small LCD screen. When turned on, it lights some of the indicators. For example, a tap means energy saving mode. It also notes the activity of the drive and hard disk, the status of * Lock-keys (A - included Caps Lock), the charge level of two batteries (you can stick two batteries at the same time at the cost of giving up the drive).
A little bit of viscera, a laptop with the keyboard removed. It can be seen that a pair of LEDs is still there - power and battery charging. On the right is the battery compartment, on the left - for drives or a second battery. In the center of the hard drive compartment is covered. RAM is placed in the center from the top, to the left of it you can see the processor radiator.
Now you can turn on and go into the BIOS.
Bios is quite concise - a screen with information about the system and drop-down menus with a small number of settings on top. The processor of these laptops set from Pentium 75 to 150 and was amenable to replacement. It was mounted on a “cartridge” along with a small amount of RAM (8 or 16 megabytes), because the maximum memory size depended on the processor and could go up to 80 megabytes (16 “basic” plus an additional 64 megabyte module). In my case it costs 64 + 8 = 72. I don’t understand the point about the network card, because there is no RJ-45 connector on the laptop, it only had a docking station.
Well, finally you can boot into the operating system. But about her a separate item will be.
And in the next part I will talk about what I had to finish and mine for complete happiness.
Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/442204/
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