Upgrading a Compaq LTE 5000 Laptop with an IDE Compact Flash Card for DOS
267Last year I found this Compaq LTE 5000 at a car boot sale looking very sad, filthy and getting rained on. I offered the bloke a fiver and he practically bit my hand off. I took the LTE 5000 apart to clean it thoroughly as it was dirty and dusty throughout. The Compaq LTE CMOS battery was dead and the mains battery was long-dead and leaking.
The LTE 5000 laptop hard drive clicked a lot and I knew it was only a matter of time before it died. I wanted to replace the HDD with a compact flash card for DOS. The previous owner had installed Win95 on a 75mhz LTE and that was not good. The first part of this Compaq laptop restoration was to get a new LTE compatible CMOS battery. The Compaq LTE needs a 4.8v AAA CMOS battery with a proprietary connector. I found a French website selling them and €28 later I had one winging its way to me. The Compaq LTE mains battery it’s a different story. To date I have bought four or five batteries for this thing, from different battery sites who all claim to have stock. After about five months of waiting, none of them have turned up and I’ve have refunds issued via PayPal. My advice is not to bother.
The Compaq LTE 5000 is running, we’ve got it booting and posting consistently so the next thing to fix was that 1GB HDD. I wanted a big CF card in lieu of a HDD. A Compact Flash card functions essentially as an SSD; no mechanical parts, fast read speed, much higher capacity. I am only planning on running DOS on this Compaq LTE and Compact Flash cards are great DOS hard drive replacements. The Compact Flash pinout is exactly the same standard as IDE, meaning that it doesn’t need to be converted. You can buy CF to IDE adapters which will make a CF card work as a HDD in your DOS PC.
I grabbed the floppy images for DOS 4 from Phil, whacked them onto some floppies and it installed immediately. At this point I have my ultimate early 90s DOS machine in this Compaq LTE 5000.
The advantage of the CF card adapter on this DOS laptop is that I can use a cheap £1 adapter to drag and drop hundreds of games onto the card. I have a Pentium 1 Compaq LTE laptop with a total spend of about £40 and it’ll do me for all my DOS games for years to come. With a few quid, a bit of patience and the help of people smarter than you, you too could put together a DOS machine of equal or better value.
NAMING AND SHAMING BAD COMPAQ LTE BATTERY SUPPLIERS:
http://www.power-supplier.co.uk/
http://www.hotbattery.co.uk/
http://www.topbatteries.co.uk/
http://www.good-battery.com/
http://www.microbattery.com/
Compaq LTE laptop CMOS battery replacement from:
http://www.sosbatteries.com/
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