Welcome!

I inherited an LTE5380, which seems to be very similar to yours other than minor specs (they look the same). These are solid laptops for sure. Mine has been idle for a long time, but my plan is to use it for car diagnosis. I think it will be perfect for datalogging the car - it's small and tough.
I've also found it's compatible with the same power supply as a P2/P3 era Thinkpad, which I just happen to have a car adapter for.
It's also pretty cool that it has SB compatible sound. I might as well put some DOS games on it and play around with it when I'm going somewhere I don't want to be. 😀 And honestly, as long as I don't need much CPU power, I think this thing is more durable for toting around than a modern laptop anyway. I just wish it had a joystick port in the back - it's only on the docking station which isn't really portable at all.

My only complaint with it is that Compaq equipped it with a fancy optional 1024x768 display, but they didn't upgrade the video hardware to match.
There's only 1MB of video memory, so if you run at native resolution 8bpp there's no double buffering, so the video performance is streaky and slow. If you set it to 800x600 it runs great - that was the native resolution of most models.
The 1024x768 model should have been equipped with 2MB video RAM. But that wasn't even available, all had 1MB. Most consumers wouldn't have known any better.
I think highly of Compaq, but I can't excuse them for that half-baked maneuver.

By the way, I remember a few years ago messing with the BIOS on these things. I don't remember the details, but the latest BIOS is very slow to boot for some reason. I saw no advantage in it - there's a slightly older BIOS which boots much quicker, so that's what I used. Just in case that matters to you.

You're right about the BIOS - it'll be a full minute before it even starts loading Windows. Mercifully, it only decides to hang like this on a cold boot. Though there are tons of things I could do to improve this machine (more RAM, bigger HDD, new battery, CD-ROM drive, PCMCIA wireless) I think it's perfectly suited for simple DOS gaming. Maybe some early Windows gaming, if I can find any programs lying around.

That's a shame about the video on your laptop; it mars an otherwise solid bit a hardware. I would think that, at least, you'd have the luxury of scaling VGA or earlier games to take up more of the screen.

bucket wrote:

That's a shame about the video on your laptop; it mars an otherwise solid bit a hardware. I would think that, at least, you'd have the luxury of scaling VGA or earlier games to take up more of the screen.

There's either a Fn-key or BIOS setting that does that, I don't remember which. I'm guessing it should look fine when scaling an old 320x200 game.

The only laptops I knew from 95-97 that scaled up were the IBM Thinkpads because of the Trident video hardware that had LCD scaling. Unfortunately those trident chips also had the drawback of having less lower resolution compatibility with directx

I must bump this to save anybody who reads this thread from repeating my mistake:

shamino wrote:

I've also found it's compatible with the same power supply as a P2/P3 era Thinkpad, which I just happen to have a car adapter for.

This didn't work.
The LTE is marked to handle up to 18V, the P2/P3 era Thinkpad supply is 16V. While the Thinkpad wall adapter was compatible, and I used it several times that way, the car adapter didn't work. I don't understand why, but the LTE5380 died when I plugged it in with the Thinkpad car adapter. It wasn't an official IBM adapter, it was made by Lind. It continues to work on the Thinkpad, so I know the adapter didn't die.

I'll probably take the LTE apart sometime and see if I can find any evidence of what I broke. I never smelled any magic smoke, there was no sign of malfunction other than the fact that it won't turn on anymore. So if I'm lucky maybe there's a fuse.

Are you running it straight off the adapter, or trying to charge the battery? If the battery isn't dead, it should be able to charge slowly.

bucket wrote:

Are you running it straight off the adapter, or trying to charge the battery? If the battery isn't dead, it should be able to charge slowly.

I was just trying to run it from the adapter. The "battery" is really more of a "jumper block" at this point. From what I remember it has to be in the laptop for it to run, but it doesn't hold enough charge to run a wrist watch for more than half a second.