History is history. The fact videos like this help to preserve these machines, I am all the happier to watch. I do hope someone is able to upload backups for this machine sometime soon.
Thank you! I hope so too. I have a friend working on the corrupt archive.org upload as we speak to get it bootable and another amazing supporter of the channel commented that they may have a recovery cd! I'm confident with the awesome support we will get this archived :)
Oh good old Compaq Armada series! My very first own computer ever was Compaq Armada 1110 with 75MHz CPU, 16 megabytes of RAM and Windows 3.11. Upgraded it to Windows 95 later, that was something with 14 floppies.. :D
Happy to see my most favourite laptop. I used this (1750) until begining of my university studies and I still have it (including the docking station, excluding battery). Up till today, I never heared about the utility. It just works even without it. I'm also quite surprised that you don't like the sound, because this is by far the best sounding laptop I've ever heard. The bass reflex ports help soooo much! Of course, as usual for me, I hopped it up over time, so at the moment, it has 80 GB drive, DVD drive (if I recall correctly), bigger LCD panel from 1700 (1750 came with smaller 800x600 panel) and also the composite video out, which was huge thing back in a day. The reason, why I still keep it, is that I have a proffesional LPT A3 scanner from the same era, which unfortunatelly doesn't work with any more modern computer. Last driver was for 98, but I somehow managed to make it running on XP. I also had two batteries, but they both died (one day they were fine and held charge, the other day they were just dead and they behaved like they were not present at all).
Happy to hear yours is still going and that scanner - that's awesome! I have an HP4C that runs on SCSI, so a world of complications with setup, drivers, OS's etc lol. As for the sound, there are two issues (one of which may be mine) - the sound is a bit tinny but that may be due to drivers? Or the previous owner damaged the speaker a bit. The other issue as I mentioned in the video is when you are resting your palms right on top of the speakers haha. I just wish they were located somewhere you wouldn't potentially be muffling them with your hands. I'm still happy with the machine overall though.
I also used it (1750) for a year or so. I am still kinda upset that I sold it. 1750 was better and it came with ATI Rage chipset with composite TV out, and better panels options, you could get 12.1-inch passive or active matrix 800x600, and then 13.3-inch and 14.1-inch XGA active matrix panels. I think the 1750 also had a bit better sound chip. I ran Windows 2000 on it, and it was fine. It was more of a Windows 98 machine to be honest. I then upgraded to Compaq Armada E500 and then to Compaq Evo N1020. And yeah, the sound was one of the best of this era. The E500 was a large disappointment in this department, but the Evo N1020 had also really good sound. I then owned HP Compaq nc8000 for about a year, which if I remember also had really good sound, and it ran really well. After that I switched to Lenovo ThinkPad R61 which I got just for the beta/RC version release of Windows 7 - that was in July of 2009. Sadly the soldered on GPU failed after few months, and I switched back to HP, this time to EliteBook 8530p... The technology really advanced fast in those years, owning a 5 year old laptop in 2009 felt like owning a 15 year laptop in 2023 :D
@@michvod You are right, the ATI Rage graphics card helped a lot! I didn't recall untill you mention it. We were playing NFS Porsche a lot back then during free hours. And yes, that game relied on 3D acceleration a lot.
I have two 1750s - these are the BEST retro laptops. I have two and they have travelled to Korea, the Carribean, and the US for some portable retro gaming. Strong cases, the batteries even last an hour apiece. Absolutely solid, excellent machines.
Goodness! This brings back memories. I worked for Compaq and then HP after the takeover in the UK in the 1990s and this was one of the laptops I was issues with! I had the docking station on my desk and they gave me one for my home office too for when I had to work from home. I remember it being chunky and a bit heavy but in those days we knew no better! Spoiled these days (says he sitting here typing on his nice and light Dell Latitude 3590!
Thank you for sharing this, glad IW as able to inspire some memories! Yeah, tech has come a very long way, but there is just something about the nostalgic feelings I get with these older systems. Thanks for sharing and for watching!
I got one of these in a batch of 10 for $100 from Goodwill’s website. This is a versatile system. I also started making CMOS batteries for this system. I made back my money on this batch with the CMOs batteries alone.
I still have one. I don’t have the floppy drive but mine have two batteries. I wish modern computers had that feature to as and remove modules with a simple button.
Used to have 3 of these (two 1750’s and a 1700) original hard disks were cactus, batteries were ok, had issues with the screen flickering and going white I found re seating (or whacking on the left side hinge) and pushing the lid switch would reset the screen. Even found a docking station for it as well, never got the bios partition set up but found a config utility, but was in French. Had a 20 gig drive and used it for a bit during high school (‘06 -07 I think). I think you can enable stretching for dos mode, might be in the config utility. I have had windows 2k running decently but XP runs slow on these (decent amount of ram might help)
I have recently located (thanks to an amazing supporter of the channel) a full restoration cd that's compatible and all of the original documents! Stay tuned for an updated video :)
I found one of these relics while cleaning out the IT office at work. I kept it for a while before selling it on eBay two years ago. It was a pretty cool laptop, I just couldn't justify keeping it since I rarely used it. Mine was the 1750 model, so unfortunately the restore CD I had with it wouldn't work on yours. The battery in mine worked too! Unfortunately it didn't last for very long. I think a few weeks after I got it the battery completely died. Replacements were super expensive (And no guarantee those would be any better), and I didn't feel like cutting open the casing to try to rebuild it.
Nice! We were able to locate the restore cd's and do a full restoration thanks to another viewer. Take a peak at that video :). Yeah, I think we are also lucky that the cells didn't swell up or cause any damage either over the years.
Not sure if I am going to add anything new. I "had" a HP OMNIBOOK XE3. The sound speakers are installed on the palmrest, thwards you. Between the speakers, there is a crystal liquid display with one or two mini incandescent bulb and some buttons that allowed you to play cd audio discs even the laptop is powered off. Even if I block the sound with my arms, the sound travels through inside of the laptop. The laptop started to have ... sound problems... the speakers themselves are fine but there is something bugging the sound chip. The output audio has lots of noise, like if I inserted a earphone plug and rotate it in an corroded jack. It started creating noise with left channel but some months later, the right channel was gone too. I kept the laptop in a laptop bag and this bag was in my wardrobe. No idea if the laptop collected moisture from the clothes... The XE3 laptop has or bether... had... a anti-glare coating lcd. 1024x768 lcd powered by a S3 something card with 16MB (or was it 8MB). A small separed pcb with its own gpu and vram. Proprietary connector and slot. Unfortunatelly I was stupid and I cleaned the lcd with alcool and a microfiber clothe and it was fine... until I poped the laptop out of the bag, opened it... and the screen was all ruined. The surface was so damaged that formed "mountains". I looked up the model but the lcd model was rare and expensive. The plastics.... the laptop has dark plastics with a metal housing inside. Even the bottom mainboard is covered by a big shield. Resuming.... never clean the lcds from ancient laptops with liquids (that includes glass cleaners) - a dry clothe will be fine to remove some dust. also keep the laptops away from humid environment. laptops have lots of metal inside ready to corrode once some water particle touches it and if the corrosion crumbles and lands over pcbs... it will cause some kind of short.
Thanks for this great info. All of my hardware is kept in a climate controlled environment and I have never used any form of alcohol on LCD panels for any reasons even when new. Its unfortunate that your machine went the way it did :(
I used to work in a management training centre for Philips Electronics from '99 to '05 and I had to maintain 50 of these bad boys, worst looking docking stations in the world ever, also included. There were 2 different resolutions available. We ran Windows 2000 Professional on these things with roaming profile from the Philips domain. Installing Citrix was complicated, I remember. Very satisfying to slide in other batteries or diskdrives: smack! PCmcia cards were the bomb.
Haha yes, I saw pictures of this docking stations.. They were quite something! I really like the versitility this machine offers with the modular battery bay. And you are right... Very satisfying hearing that click sound haha
I had a compaq Precerio (forgive spelling) 386/25hz, 80 meg HD, 4 meg ram dual scan grey scale screen, MSDOS 6.2. I pushed that to it's limits and managed to install win95 and it worked. Would sit with desktop screen and BMP image of win 95 though the moment you clicked on anything, you'd be greeted with stack overflow failure. AKA re-install Dos Win 3.11 as everything collapsed and left the drive.
God I hated this old style COMPAQ bios. Every other vendor (sans IBM and Apple) has their firmware interface in ROM - this Compaq has that interface stored on that hidden partition. In later models I think if that partition is available and has the utility you get the "F10 to enter BIOS" message, otherwise you don't - you need to access it from the boot floppy.
Compaq did the modularity before these models as well, got an LTE 5100 & 5250 and they feature this too (95/96). Be to say I prefer the beige rectangle though haha
I had one of these 1700 laptops i used it to play diablo 2 back in the day i had upgraded the ram with a 128 mb strip boy were those expensive back than! great vintage laptops for sure!
It's a beauty of a machine. Took a lot of research and community support but we got it fully restored and the restoration materials uploaded to archive.org :)
I have a couple of old Armadas with a similar bios setup - the 7730MT, which was white and the 7800, which looked something like the 1700, except you had to choose between having the floppy or the optical drive in the left bay.. Both have internal psus so you only need the 3 leaf clover cable to power them up. I managed to find the bios disk images online for those somehow. I think both are running a flavour of OS/2 but I haven't taken them out of storage for a couple of years.
Have the same model and added the Xircom network and dialup modem to it. Also windows 98 SE and the Firefox version 2.0.0.14 that does connect to the internet too. I also have a rare parallel port internet card 10mbit but not yet tested. There should be a box with more Xircom cards somewhere
Something tells me all of that is taken care of as part of the original compaq restoration package. I have a friend working on one right now for me. In the mean time, I can work on getting those setup and do additional testing.
I have a compaq armada 3500 with the expansion bay. I removed the cd-rom from it and put in a dvd burner drive, it even plays DVDs just fine on the 2meg video card. and sound fine with built in sub woofer on the bottom of the expansion bay.
I bought a Compaq Armada with Pentium II 366MHz and ATI Rage Mobility graphics (with measly 8MB of VRAM), which must have been the successor to this particular model. In the end, it seemed that anything 3D released past 2000 would have trouble running on it. 🤔
I didn't see that! It was set to defaults after I had loaded the Compaq software.. So I have no idea how it would be set to disabled unless it's that way by default. I'll check it out, thanks!
12:26 Actually completely normal. I have 3 working 6 gb deathstar laptop drives... they are in various conditions, healthy, questionable, and nearing death, but they all rattle like that. A lot of my other perfectly fine and working hard drives do it, too. But deathstars do it the loudest.
The good, old, IBM Thinkpads had a nice feature where the CD drive could swap out for a floppy drive or a big second battery, and it was identical to the first battery. So you could swap things in and out as you needed them. Had USB, too, so nowadays you could just use some enormous multi-terabyte USB stick to keep your files on. Best feature though was the IBM Nipple, AKA Trackpoint. Little nipple in the middle of the keyboard that was an extremely sensitive sort of joystick that sensed how far you bent it. Further = faster mouse movement. You could be really accurate with it. Seems weird at first, but after I tried it I never used the normal track pad again.
Yeah but I think this was one of the last models to do so. I've worked on many Armada E500 Pentium 3 laptops which had the setup on the chip. But older Compaqs like the LTE Elite and 5000 series had them on the hard drive, too.
I have a Compaq 1750, and interestingly it came with a ZIP Drive in place of the floppy drive. Which is handy, until you realise you could do with a floppy disk more than a ZIP disk and you don't have a second ZIP drive! It also has a DVD-ROM drive as well. It also has the ability in the BIOS to display an address (which mine had). It's in storage now, I could do with pulling it out and putting it to use.
That sounds like a pretty great machine for the time.. It must have been a later model (or more feature filled model) than the 1700. Yes!! Dig yours out and get it going :)
A 128 MB RAM stick might be the maximum supported size for the 1700, but I have the same 1700 (though P2 300 MHz CPU instead of 266) and it accepted a 256 MB stick without issue, so I thought I'd let people know that if they were interested in upgrading the RAM. Still nowhere near the 48 GB of RAM I have in my current PC 🤣 but for the time (and especially on a laptop) that was a huge deal.
Many laptops at the time (and I have/had Toshiba, Notebook, TwinStar and I saw many others with similar configurations:P2@233, 32-64M integrated RAM, Win95 OS) had in the setup/BIOS an option for doubling the pixels in plain dos; it just stretched the image to fit the panel if the resolution was lower than the native panel resolution. About the sound in dos, I hav many "SB compatible" sound chips that worked well under Windows but gave no soud under dos, were undetected or worse, distorted the sound and froze/slowdown the machine. I found that the issue with them are the drivers; in Win98 the installed drivers ae WDM and in Win95 are VXD, the intended OS being Win95, you should use VXD drivers. Why? because those drivers installl a dos init program that make the chip recognizable under dos. And, those many times do not work as intended under Win98 (the dos sound is not always properly installed or have conflicts with Win98 WDM drivers, I had many troubles with Crystal Sound chips)
Many desktop PCs were also plagued with those "compatible" sound chips. I got a genuine Soundblaster 16 instead and had no problems. The music and sound effects from Doom screaming out my speakers through a proper hifi amplifier, only way to do it! Was an ISA card so eventually it had to go, but for the price, about £80 at the time, I got my money's worth. Now you can just emulate a PC on your PC so there's no problems!
Bummer about the busted laptop "DeathStar" and the imperfect sound compatibility. Having a proper Sound Blaster Pro / OPL3 chip would give the best results!
After some searching I found a bootable disk a: with ghost.exe and since the armada has a d: partition I created n disk image of the fat12 (bios) and c: partition Just in case the old disk fails. Just wondering if I still have a harddrive that fits.
Nice! I think someone also uploaded their HDD image to archive.org as well which I believe includes the fat12 partition. It's awesome that you still have a working copy to be able to do this!
I do not believe that I have, but I tend to come accross some cool stuff. I'm sure one will turn up someday. I also did a follow up video to this one, check it out:)
If you reset the bios settings to default it will stretch the video in dos mode you will notice the difference in the windows 98 splash screen when booting it may also help with the dos soundblaster compatibility as i seem to recall having the same sound issue. I have two of these and one i got came with the recovery disc if you would like a copy.
That would be amazing, you have 2 of the 1700s? I think it has to be that exact model for the recovery to work. If you have the recovery cd - would you be able to image it and upload to archive? Or provide a link and I can upload it? Thanks soooo much!
@@TheRetroRecall I emailed you more information about the quickrestore disc. Strange thing is it doesn't specify on the disc that it is for a certain configuration just that it is for the armada 1700. The instructions give you an alternate code to the serial number to try if it is not accepted. I will need to update my archive upload with scans of the instructions and the disc. Just so you are aware the image i uploaded is also the british version i don't know if that would affect the restore process for your one. If you still have issues with the quick restore next best option is if i change the hard disk on the laptop, do a clean restore, dump an image of the drive and then upload to archive. The only difference i noticed of your model is that it has a 266MHz CPU and my one is 300MHz. I do hope you can manage to restore the system as there is not much videos of the armada 1700. The factory install also has a real dos mode shortcut and loads pretty much everything you need to run various things in dos.
Many thanks and I agree I really want to get this going as like you said, there isn't much about this laptop. I will be trying your instructions over the weekend and will report back. If we have to, and you are willing - to take an image of a newly built drive - in the end that may be 98% of the way there! :). I will let you know for sure one I read through what you have sent me. As for the CPU, I don't think that will affect anything. Thanks again, and talk soon!
Searched all cd but have only a compac wlan multiport w200 driver and doc cd & a compac multilingual user interface EN for windows xp pro but it does not say what Compaq model
Ahh yes lots of ports. We love having plenty of places to plug our cable into. 🤣 Also you may want to open this up and make sure it dosent have any leaky batteries.
Haha! I'm not sure to be honest. I mostly find documents, financial records etc that I destroy. I've never really come accross many pictures to be honest :)
Maybe the restauration image for the correct model is just not bootable windows 95 by default was not bootable, so maybe compaq had not made that one bootable for some reasons
They are definitely bootable. The 1750 disk boots. I have a friend who is looking at the 1700 image and found that the boot portion was corrupted. He's working to fix it. But also some more good news, one of the channel supporters just uploaded one to archive.org as well! We may have hope!
@@TheRetroRecall When restoring it will ask for the laptop serial number before restoring. there is a possibility the restore doesn't like large drives as i had issues with one of my 1700s i had added a 100GB ide drive to, it accepted the serial number but hangs.
History is history. The fact videos like this help to preserve these machines, I am all the happier to watch. I do hope someone is able to upload backups for this machine sometime soon.
Thank you! I hope so too. I have a friend working on the corrupt archive.org upload as we speak to get it bootable and another amazing supporter of the channel commented that they may have a recovery cd! I'm confident with the awesome support we will get this archived :)
Oh good old Compaq Armada series! My very first own computer ever was Compaq Armada 1110 with 75MHz CPU, 16 megabytes of RAM and Windows 3.11. Upgraded it to Windows 95 later, that was something with 14 floppies.. :D
Haha! Talk about a blast from the past!
Damn for 30 bucks it's hard to pass something like this up to play around with. Excellent find. 👍
Agreed and thanks!
$30 because the seller knew that these older Compaq's were a pain the rear to restore. 😅
Hahahahah soooo bloody true!
I paid $100 for one, and got another one for free (smashed screen, since replaced) - they are excellent machines.
Happy to see my most favourite laptop. I used this (1750) until begining of my university studies and I still have it (including the docking station, excluding battery). Up till today, I never heared about the utility. It just works even without it. I'm also quite surprised that you don't like the sound, because this is by far the best sounding laptop I've ever heard. The bass reflex ports help soooo much! Of course, as usual for me, I hopped it up over time, so at the moment, it has 80 GB drive, DVD drive (if I recall correctly), bigger LCD panel from 1700 (1750 came with smaller 800x600 panel) and also the composite video out, which was huge thing back in a day. The reason, why I still keep it, is that I have a proffesional LPT A3 scanner from the same era, which unfortunatelly doesn't work with any more modern computer. Last driver was for 98, but I somehow managed to make it running on XP. I also had two batteries, but they both died (one day they were fine and held charge, the other day they were just dead and they behaved like they were not present at all).
Happy to hear yours is still going and that scanner - that's awesome! I have an HP4C that runs on SCSI, so a world of complications with setup, drivers, OS's etc lol. As for the sound, there are two issues (one of which may be mine) - the sound is a bit tinny but that may be due to drivers? Or the previous owner damaged the speaker a bit. The other issue as I mentioned in the video is when you are resting your palms right on top of the speakers haha. I just wish they were located somewhere you wouldn't potentially be muffling them with your hands. I'm still happy with the machine overall though.
I also used it (1750) for a year or so. I am still kinda upset that I sold it. 1750 was better and it came with ATI Rage chipset with composite TV out, and better panels options, you could get 12.1-inch passive or active matrix 800x600, and then 13.3-inch and 14.1-inch XGA active matrix panels. I think the 1750 also had a bit better sound chip. I ran Windows 2000 on it, and it was fine. It was more of a Windows 98 machine to be honest. I then upgraded to Compaq Armada E500 and then to Compaq Evo N1020. And yeah, the sound was one of the best of this era. The E500 was a large disappointment in this department, but the Evo N1020 had also really good sound. I then owned HP Compaq nc8000 for about a year, which if I remember also had really good sound, and it ran really well. After that I switched to Lenovo ThinkPad R61 which I got just for the beta/RC version release of Windows 7 - that was in July of 2009. Sadly the soldered on GPU failed after few months, and I switched back to HP, this time to EliteBook 8530p... The technology really advanced fast in those years, owning a 5 year old laptop in 2009 felt like owning a 15 year laptop in 2023 :D
Hahha that's awesome and so true! Do you have any of these laptops still to this day?
@@michvod You are right, the ATI Rage graphics card helped a lot! I didn't recall untill you mention it. We were playing NFS Porsche a lot back then during free hours. And yes, that game relied on 3D acceleration a lot.
I wish I had a 3d card in this machine, it would have made all of the difference for sure!
Love how in depth your videos are!
Thank you! I tend to ramble but I figure more detail the better... Especially if we are talking old tech and preserving it!
@@TheRetroRecall That rambling makes me happy because I am the same way! I’ve been watching your videos all weekend, thanks man.
Awesome!!! I'm happy to hear and I hope you are enjoying :)
I have two 1750s - these are the BEST retro laptops. I have two and they have travelled to Korea, the Carribean, and the US for some portable retro gaming. Strong cases, the batteries even last an hour apiece. Absolutely solid, excellent machines.
That's great and they are well traveled!!
Goodness! This brings back memories. I worked for Compaq and then HP after the takeover in the UK in the 1990s and this was one of the laptops I was issues with! I had the docking station on my desk and they gave me one for my home office too for when I had to work from home. I remember it being chunky and a bit heavy but in those days we knew no better! Spoiled these days (says he sitting here typing on his nice and light Dell Latitude 3590!
Thank you for sharing this, glad IW as able to inspire some memories! Yeah, tech has come a very long way, but there is just something about the nostalgic feelings I get with these older systems. Thanks for sharing and for watching!
I got one of these in a batch of 10 for $100 from Goodwill’s website. This is a versatile system. I also started making CMOS batteries for this system. I made back my money on this batch with the CMOs batteries alone.
Nice deal!
7.2V like the Dells of the time? Or am I confusing that with a 4/25 LTE?
If we are talking the CMOS battery, I think someone said it's a regular cr2032.. But I could have misread it.
@@the_kombinator the 1700 uses a regular CR2032. The LTE Lite does have a 7.2V battery used for suspend purposes.
@@i80386sx Then I must be confusing the two. My LTE needed one and I don't remember which laptop got which cell.
I would hve been great to find this. Well worth it to play around with. I would have give double that!!!
Yeah for 30, I couldn't say no!
I still have one. I don’t have the floppy drive but mine have two batteries. I wish modern computers had that feature to as and remove modules with a simple button.
That's awesome and agreed. I find Today's machines uninspiring lol
We had laptop carts of these in the school system I work at. Started in 2005, and they were still using them.
That's awesome to hear!
Used to have 3 of these (two 1750’s and a 1700) original hard disks were cactus, batteries were ok, had issues with the screen flickering and going white I found re seating (or whacking on the left side hinge) and pushing the lid switch would reset the screen.
Even found a docking station for it as well, never got the bios partition set up but found a config utility, but was in French. Had a 20 gig drive and used it for a bit during high school (‘06 -07 I think). I think you can enable stretching for dos mode, might be in the config utility. I have had windows 2k running decently but XP runs slow on these (decent amount of ram might help)
I have recently located (thanks to an amazing supporter of the channel) a full restoration cd that's compatible and all of the original documents! Stay tuned for an updated video :)
I found one of these relics while cleaning out the IT office at work. I kept it for a while before selling it on eBay two years ago. It was a pretty cool laptop, I just couldn't justify keeping it since I rarely used it. Mine was the 1750 model, so unfortunately the restore CD I had with it wouldn't work on yours.
The battery in mine worked too! Unfortunately it didn't last for very long. I think a few weeks after I got it the battery completely died. Replacements were super expensive (And no guarantee those would be any better), and I didn't feel like cutting open the casing to try to rebuild it.
Nice! We were able to locate the restore cd's and do a full restoration thanks to another viewer. Take a peak at that video :). Yeah, I think we are also lucky that the cells didn't swell up or cause any damage either over the years.
for the sound id try pure dos mode with the unisound driver. Some of the ESS laptop also had the ESS chip for wavetable synth.
Thank you!
Not sure if I am going to add anything new. I "had" a HP OMNIBOOK XE3. The sound speakers are installed on the palmrest, thwards you. Between the speakers, there is a crystal liquid display with one or two mini incandescent bulb and some buttons that allowed you to play cd audio discs even the laptop is powered off. Even if I block the sound with my arms, the sound travels through inside of the laptop. The laptop started to have ... sound problems... the speakers themselves are fine but there is something bugging the sound chip. The output audio has lots of noise, like if I inserted a earphone plug and rotate it in an corroded jack. It started creating noise with left channel but some months later, the right channel was gone too. I kept the laptop in a laptop bag and this bag was in my wardrobe. No idea if the laptop collected moisture from the clothes...
The XE3 laptop has or bether... had... a anti-glare coating lcd. 1024x768 lcd powered by a S3 something card with 16MB (or was it 8MB). A small separed pcb with its own gpu and vram. Proprietary connector and slot. Unfortunatelly I was stupid and I cleaned the lcd with alcool and a microfiber clothe and it was fine... until I poped the laptop out of the bag, opened it... and the screen was all ruined. The surface was so damaged that formed "mountains". I looked up the model but the lcd model was rare and expensive.
The plastics.... the laptop has dark plastics with a metal housing inside. Even the bottom mainboard is covered by a big shield.
Resuming.... never clean the lcds from ancient laptops with liquids (that includes glass cleaners) - a dry clothe will be fine to remove some dust. also keep the laptops away from humid environment. laptops have lots of metal inside ready to corrode once some water particle touches it and if the corrosion crumbles and lands over pcbs... it will cause some kind of short.
Thanks for this great info. All of my hardware is kept in a climate controlled environment and I have never used any form of alcohol on LCD panels for any reasons even when new. Its unfortunate that your machine went the way it did :(
I used to work in a management training centre for Philips Electronics from '99 to '05 and I had to maintain 50 of these bad boys, worst looking docking stations in the world ever, also included. There were 2 different resolutions available. We ran Windows 2000 Professional on these things with roaming profile from the Philips domain. Installing Citrix was complicated, I remember. Very satisfying to slide in other batteries or diskdrives: smack! PCmcia cards were the bomb.
Haha yes, I saw pictures of this docking stations.. They were quite something! I really like the versitility this machine offers with the modular battery bay. And you are right... Very satisfying hearing that click sound haha
I had a compaq Precerio (forgive spelling) 386/25hz, 80 meg HD, 4 meg ram dual scan grey scale screen, MSDOS 6.2. I pushed that to it's limits and managed to install win95 and it worked. Would sit with desktop screen and BMP image of win 95 though the moment you clicked on anything, you'd be greeted with stack overflow failure. AKA re-install Dos Win 3.11 as everything collapsed and left the drive.
I wish you still had that system up and running! I love the older Compaq machines 386,486 and Pentium line :)
God I hated this old style COMPAQ bios. Every other vendor (sans IBM and Apple) has their firmware interface in ROM - this Compaq has that interface stored on that hidden partition. In later models I think if that partition is available and has the utility you get the "F10 to enter BIOS" message, otherwise you don't - you need to access it from the boot floppy.
Yes exactly. To get this going again was such a pain... Finding these files was extremely difficult. I'll be uploading them to archive.
Compaq did the modularity before these models as well, got an LTE 5100 & 5250 and they feature this too (95/96). Be to say I prefer the beige rectangle though haha
Ah that's neat! I didn't go back and see the history but it is a cool system.
12:54 Wow I never knew that. I have worked on and recovered many machines but never came across that situation, what a pain in the butt to restore.
Yup it was 100%. But hopefully now the files will be easily accessible for everyone to benefit from!
I had one of these 1700 laptops i used it to play diablo 2 back in the day i had upgraded the ram with a 128 mb strip boy were those expensive back than! great vintage laptops for sure!
It's a beauty of a machine. Took a lot of research and community support but we got it fully restored and the restoration materials uploaded to archive.org :)
I have a couple of old Armadas with a similar bios setup - the 7730MT, which was white and the 7800, which looked something like the 1700, except you had to choose between having the floppy or the optical drive in the left bay.. Both have internal psus so you only need the 3 leaf clover cable to power them up. I managed to find the bios disk images online for those somehow. I think both are running a flavour of OS/2 but I haven't taken them out of storage for a couple of years.
Pretty cool that you still have them! It would be great to get them going again :)
Have the same model and added the Xircom network and dialup modem to it. Also windows 98 SE and the Firefox version 2.0.0.14 that does connect to the internet too. I also have a rare parallel port internet card 10mbit but not yet tested. There should be a box with more Xircom cards somewhere
Nice!!
The ESS sound card requires a TSR in DOS in order to work.
Something tells me all of that is taken care of as part of the original compaq restoration package. I have a friend working on one right now for me. In the mean time, I can work on getting those setup and do additional testing.
@@TheRetroRecall I have mine working perfectly in 98 and DOS. I have the software, I can pull it off the machine if you want it.
I have a compaq armada 3500 with the expansion bay. I removed the cd-rom from it and put in a dvd burner drive, it even plays DVDs just fine on the 2meg video card. and sound fine with built in sub woofer on the bottom of the expansion bay.
That's awesome!
I bought a Compaq Armada with Pentium II 366MHz and ATI Rage Mobility graphics (with measly 8MB of VRAM), which must have been the successor to this particular model. In the end, it seemed that anything 3D released past 2000 would have trouble running on it. 🤔
Yes, I think it was the model up from this one, and that ati card would have been far better than the one I have.
The modem was set to DISABLED in the bios, that's why it's not loading in Windows
I didn't see that! It was set to defaults after I had loaded the Compaq software.. So I have no idea how it would be set to disabled unless it's that way by default. I'll check it out, thanks!
A lot of old laptops just didn't support scaling in hardware. Proper drivers may or may not fix it.
Good to know. I'd like to get the original recovery restored to see if that fixes anything both in DOS and in Windows.
My 1st computer, i loved playing Doom online with it.
Awesome!
I struggle with laptop keyboards, sausage fingers lol...nice machine!
Lol!!! Thanks!
12:26 Actually completely normal. I have 3 working 6 gb deathstar laptop drives... they are in various conditions, healthy, questionable, and nearing death, but they all rattle like that. A lot of my other perfectly fine and working hard drives do it, too. But deathstars do it the loudest.
Really... That shocks me!! Thanks for this info. Maybe a reason why they have such a high failure rate haha!
If it works, then yes. It's worth it. It sure cost a whole lot more than that when it was new.
For sure, and it still has lots of life left in it now.
The good, old, IBM Thinkpads had a nice feature where the CD drive could swap out for a floppy drive or a big second battery, and it was identical to the first battery. So you could swap things in and out as you needed them. Had USB, too, so nowadays you could just use some enormous multi-terabyte USB stick to keep your files on.
Best feature though was the IBM Nipple, AKA Trackpoint. Little nipple in the middle of the keyboard that was an extremely sensitive sort of joystick that sensed how far you bent it. Further = faster mouse movement. You could be really accurate with it. Seems weird at first, but after I tried it I never used the normal track pad again.
I love Thinkpads. I have done a few videos on them on the channel, check them out :)
An interesting old laptop!👍👍 So the bios used to be installed on the hard drive, I did not know that and thanks for sharing that fact.
Yeah but I think this was one of the last models to do so. I've worked on many Armada E500 Pentium 3 laptops which had the setup on the chip. But older Compaqs like the LTE Elite and 5000 series had them on the hard drive, too.
Yup, such a bad design lol.
Good to know!!
I'd love to get my hands on a Compaq Contura Aero 4/25. 😢
I had to google this, as I've never seen one before. Now that's a retro machine!
I have a Compaq 1750, and interestingly it came with a ZIP Drive in place of the floppy drive. Which is handy, until you realise you could do with a floppy disk more than a ZIP disk and you don't have a second ZIP drive! It also has a DVD-ROM drive as well. It also has the ability in the BIOS to display an address (which mine had). It's in storage now, I could do with pulling it out and putting it to use.
That sounds like a pretty great machine for the time.. It must have been a later model (or more feature filled model) than the 1700. Yes!! Dig yours out and get it going :)
I still have an evo600 Pentium III mobile. That one also has removable combo drive that allows you to put an additional battery instead
Nice! I think it's a great feature that got lost over the years. Offers greater flexibility!
@@TheRetroRecall it clearly was, the extra battery could add between 1:30-2h extra, wich was a huge deal at the time
A 128 MB RAM stick might be the maximum supported size for the 1700, but I have the same 1700 (though P2 300 MHz CPU instead of 266) and it accepted a 256 MB stick without issue, so I thought I'd let people know that if they were interested in upgrading the RAM. Still nowhere near the 48 GB of RAM I have in my current PC 🤣 but for the time (and especially on a laptop) that was a huge deal.
100%! 160 is the max supported in this unit, happy to hear yours is the slightly upgraded model. What did they have for graphics in your unit?
Many laptops at the time (and I have/had Toshiba, Notebook, TwinStar and I saw many others with similar configurations:P2@233, 32-64M integrated RAM, Win95 OS) had in the setup/BIOS an option for doubling the pixels in plain dos; it just stretched the image to fit the panel if the resolution was lower than the native panel resolution. About the sound in dos, I hav many "SB compatible" sound chips that worked well under Windows but gave no soud under dos, were undetected or worse, distorted the sound and froze/slowdown the machine. I found that the issue with them are the drivers; in Win98 the installed drivers ae WDM and in Win95 are VXD, the intended OS being Win95, you should use VXD drivers. Why? because those drivers installl a dos init program that make the chip recognizable under dos. And, those many times do not work as intended under Win98 (the dos sound is not always properly installed or have conflicts with Win98 WDM drivers, I had many troubles with Crystal Sound chips)
Thank you for this!!! I will give it a try.
Many desktop PCs were also plagued with those "compatible" sound chips. I got a genuine Soundblaster 16 instead and had no problems. The music and sound effects from Doom screaming out my speakers through a proper hifi amplifier, only way to do it! Was an ISA card so eventually it had to go, but for the price, about £80 at the time, I got my money's worth.
Now you can just emulate a PC on your PC so there's no problems!
True, but there's just something about retro hardware and those amazing sb16s!
Bummer about the busted laptop "DeathStar" and the imperfect sound compatibility. Having a proper Sound Blaster Pro / OPL3 chip would give the best results!
For sure. I think there are some fixes to help, so I will try those.
@@TheRetroRecall Fingers crossed for positive results! 🤞🤞
Super retro compaq laptop so far!☺️👍
Yes!!
Had one for 6 years. It's an excellent portable retro gaming machine.
It is, thanks so much I'll see you in the next one!😁
Try the UNISOUND driver to get the ESS 1869 working in DOS.
Sounds good, thank you!
I like this laptop already.
It's a great machine.
After some searching I found a bootable disk a: with ghost.exe and since the armada has a d: partition I created n disk image of the fat12 (bios) and c: partition
Just in case the old disk fails. Just wondering if I still have a harddrive that fits.
Nice! I think someone also uploaded their HDD image to archive.org as well which I believe includes the fat12 partition. It's awesome that you still have a working copy to be able to do this!
Phenomenal video. Did you ever own a Compaq Presario with Windows Vista?...I am searching for one on eBay.
I do not believe that I have, but I tend to come accross some cool stuff. I'm sure one will turn up someday. I also did a follow up video to this one, check it out:)
Yes absolutely. I've been really busy here in New York starting the New Year, but I will surely follow up on your previous video. Thanks for sharing.😊
No problem!! Thank you for watching and being a part of the channel!
If you reset the bios settings to default it will stretch the video in dos mode you will notice the difference in the windows 98 splash screen when booting it may also help with the dos soundblaster compatibility as i seem to recall having the same sound issue. I have two of these and one i got came with the recovery disc if you would like a copy.
That would be amazing, you have 2 of the 1700s? I think it has to be that exact model for the recovery to work. If you have the recovery cd - would you be able to image it and upload to archive? Or provide a link and I can upload it? Thanks soooo much!
@@TheRetroRecall TH-cam keeps deleting my replies. I have uploaded the image to archive.
I think it's because it won't accept links. Can you please email the link to my email? You are amazing!! TH-cam@bravtech.ca
@@TheRetroRecall I emailed you more information about the quickrestore disc. Strange thing is it doesn't specify on the disc that it is for a certain configuration just that it is for the armada 1700. The instructions give you an alternate code to the serial number to try if it is not accepted. I will need to update my archive upload with scans of the instructions and the disc. Just so you are aware the image i uploaded is also the british version i don't know if that would affect the restore process for your one. If you still have issues with the quick restore next best option is if i change the hard disk on the laptop, do a clean restore, dump an image of the drive and then upload to archive. The only difference i noticed of your model is that it has a 266MHz CPU and my one is 300MHz. I do hope you can manage to restore the system as there is not much videos of the armada 1700. The factory install also has a real dos mode shortcut and loads pretty much everything you need to run various things in dos.
Many thanks and I agree I really want to get this going as like you said, there isn't much about this laptop. I will be trying your instructions over the weekend and will report back. If we have to, and you are willing - to take an image of a newly built drive - in the end that may be 98% of the way there! :). I will let you know for sure one I read through what you have sent me. As for the CPU, I don't think that will affect anything. Thanks again, and talk soon!
Searched all cd but have only a compac wlan multiport w200 driver and doc cd & a compac multilingual user interface EN for windows xp pro but it does not say what Compaq model
The cd I used was the factory cd for this particular model.
Ahh yes lots of ports. We love having plenty of places to plug our cable into. 🤣 Also you may want to open this up and make sure it dosent have any leaky batteries.
Bahahaha ports ports ports, give us all the ports!
The 1700 has a CR2032 inside. No Vartas for these.
Good to know, thank you! This one seems to keep going. Do you know how to access the battery?
@@TheRetroRecall it’s under the keyboard. Three screws hold the keyboard in.
Thank you!
What's the weirdest photo you found left on an old laptop or computer. I agree old laptops are better then new one .. .
Haha! I'm not sure to be honest. I mostly find documents, financial records etc that I destroy. I've never really come accross many pictures to be honest :)
Did you figure out how to use the composite out?
Composite out... Did I miss that feature? Was it part of the Convenience Dock II?
Can't you run Doom 2 through windows to use the windows sound drivers?
Yes, it works no problem using doom95.
You can, but you can also use the drivers it came with. 20 mins of googling (6 years ago) and I'm up and running.
mine is a p1 mmx 133mhz.
Nice!!
The coating on old ThinkPads starts coming off and it looks terrible unfortunately.
Agreed. I did a restoration on a 380xd and completely stripped the coating.
I'm willing to bet this goofy machine has a goofy keyboard command to make those DOS games switch to full screen.
It does!! We figured it out!! :)
@@TheRetroRecall which button was it can you remember?
I think it was fn 7
Maybe the restauration image for the correct model is just not bootable
windows 95 by default was not bootable, so maybe compaq had not made that one bootable for some reasons
They are definitely bootable. The 1750 disk boots. I have a friend who is looking at the 1700 image and found that the boot portion was corrupted. He's working to fix it. But also some more good news, one of the channel supporters just uploaded one to archive.org as well! We may have hope!
@@TheRetroRecall When restoring it will ask for the laptop serial number before restoring. there is a possibility the restore doesn't like large drives as i had issues with one of my 1700s i had added a 100GB ide drive to, it accepted the serial number but hangs.
@@TheRetroRecall Ah ok, great !
Awesome, thank you and got your email!
Silence Doom II: Silence on Earth
Hahahahahah
is that a 1531dm?
stupid me didn't read the title....that one is newer than mine.
No problem and a 1700 :)
i still need sound drivers for mine as well and a cd drive since mine was missing when i got it.@@TheRetroRecall
headphone and... mic..
Yes?
@@TheRetroRecall you said headphone and speakers
Haha well then, my apologies! I didn't catch that during editing.
*Ruined.
HP *ruined* Compaq :(
I won't argue with you there.