$30 Compaq Armada - Was it worth it? 

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.

Damn for 30 bucks it's hard to pass something like this up to play around with. Excellent find. 👍

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

Love how in depth your videos are!

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.

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).

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.

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.

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.

I would hve been great to find this. Well worth it to play around with. I would have give double that!!!

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.

We had laptop carts of these in the school system I work at. Started in 2005, and they were still using them.

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 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.

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.

The ESS sound card requires a TSR in DOS in order to work.

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 struggle with laptop keyboards, sausage fingers lol...nice machine!

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 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.

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'd love to get my hands on a Compaq Contura Aero 4/25. 😢

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.

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.

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

My 1st computer, i loved playing Doom online with it.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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!

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.

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.

Super retro compaq laptop so far!☺️👍

If it works, then yes. It's worth it. It sure cost a whole lot more than that when it was new.

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)

A lot of old laptops just didn't support scaling in hardware. Proper drivers may or may not fix it.

I like this laptop already.

The modem was set to DISABLED in the bios, that's why it's not loading in Windows

mine is a p1 mmx 133mhz.

I still have an evo600 Pentium III mobile. That one also has removable combo drive that allows you to put an additional battery instead

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.

Bummer about the busted laptop "DeathStar" and the imperfect sound compatibility. Having a proper Sound Blaster Pro / OPL3 chip would give the best results!

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.

Try the UNISOUND driver to get the ESS 1869 working in DOS.

I'm willing to bet this goofy machine has a goofy keyboard command to make those DOS games switch to full screen.

Did you figure out how to use the composite out?

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.

Phenomenal video. Did you ever own a Compaq Presario with Windows Vista?...I am searching for one on eBay.

The coating on old ThinkPads starts coming off and it looks terrible unfortunately.

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

Can't you run Doom 2 through windows to use the windows sound drivers?

Silence Doom II: Silence on Earth

What's the weirdest photo you found left on an old laptop or computer. I agree old laptops are better then new one .. .

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

is that a 1531dm?

headphone and... mic..

*Ruined. HP *ruined* Compaq :(