Hello all! I have been away from the forums for a while, mostly because I haven't been dabbling much in retro hardware but instead in Linux projects. However, my love for retro had a major resurgence when I bought some pretty cool boxed games, and so I picked up a project I'd started a while ago but abandoned pretty quickly.

About half a year ago I acquired a Compaq LTE 5400 for free. My dad had it sitting around in his old office's closet, and he was going to just toss it. Not wanting to see it go to the dump, I decided to take it off his hands and keep it around as a future project. It's a laptop covered in horrendous amounts of grime, with no charger, and who knows what kind of software on it. It came kitted with a CD drive, internal hard drive with the cover for it missing, and a dead battery. There's a cracked hinge that makes it a little concerning to toy with if you aren't careful, but nothing I can't personally deal with. After all, I can likely transfer the good parts to a surrogate later. After looking into what little information I could source from quick Google searches, I decided to purchase an after market charger for it. Though it is a little more powerful than the laptop is intended to handle (by 1 volt) I decided to risk it and see if it would work. Surprisingly, it's caused no issues. I was able to get The Oregon Trail installed on the Windows 95 installation, which was quite cluttered. It seemed to work fine after cleaning the disk. After this, I set the project aside as I couldn't really find much information easily about the laptop, and I wasn't in the mood to mess with it as I had my Windows 98 PC in progress.

Now a few months have gone by and I've pulled it back out from under my desk, and started researching more. I found a video by the 8-Bit Guy on YouTube and it made me really want to get a proper DOS machine set up, and since I don't have room for another proper desktop a laptop would be an okay option. After spending some time researching I was able to find a 16-bit Modem card for it, to fill the empty slot, as well as a Dell branded floppy drive that should fit. Both were relatively cheap, the floppy drive being about $5 and the Modem being about $20. There's still the problem of needing to clean the machine drastically, so I will be looking into getting retro-bright solution, as well as fixing the trackpoint. I'm going to be disassembling the entire machine later on to make sure the internals are all fine, and unfortunately it looks like finding a good surrogate to move the machine to might not be easy since the laptop is going for pretty hefty prices at this point. If nothing else, I can at least just leave it set on my desk hooked up to my second monitor and use an external mouse and keyboard on it. The only issue left to resolve is the hard drive. It's an old 2GB hard drive, so I pulled it from the machine and removed it from the bracket holding it. My dad had an 8GB Compact Flash card laying around, so I'm ordering an adapter online. Ultimately the machine is costing me around $50-60 to repair, which compared to prices for similar laptops is not that bad. So long as I can get it apart and clean all of the casing properly, it should be a nice little DOS gaming machine when I get all of the parts in and set it up. I'm still debating whether I want to run pure DOS or Windows 98 SE and boot to DOS by default.

I'll post updates as the project goes, and if you're interested please ask any questions you have. I'll try and address things as they come up, including your questions or suggestions. If you have any more knowledge on this line of computer, or this specific model, I'd be interested in learning about it from you! I don't have any pictures at the moment, but as I work I will get pictures and put them up in later posts.