On Sun, 13 Jan 2002, Richard Erlacher wrote: While not quite yet a classic, one of my more favorite series of laptops is the Compaq LTE 5000. It supported a total of 4 pcmcia cards when it was used with a docking station. These were truly unique machines IMHO, and set the standards for removable cdrom and floppy drives in future laptop systems. I don't know of any other manufacturer at the time who offered a machine with similar features. The 5000 series consisted of models from the 5000 to the 5400. They were beige in color, like the earlier LTE laptops offered by Compaq, and are still distinct today. All of the 5000 series laptops were mid range Pentium systems, with the 5400 topping out at 150MHz. The 5400 had 512k of cpu cache, the rest had 256k. Ram wise, the 5400 topped out at 80MB (16MB built-in and 64MB module), with most topping out at 72MB (only 8MB was built-in.) The multi-bay feature was a big selling point for these laptops. You could remove the floppy or cdrom drive from the laptop's multi-bay, and put in a second battery for extended road trips. The docking stations had two more multi-bays, so when docked, a total of 3 were available. The MPEG capture/playback module is still a unique feature of the 5000 series. It was a rectangular box with connectors on the rear that plugged into the laptop's expansion connector. It would also fit into a special opening on the docking stations. I haven't yet seen another docking station that offers a MIDI/joystick port. The docking station also had an ISA slot, and one of the two models had built-in speakers for audio playback. The amplifier circuit for the built-in speakers was prone to picking up noise from the data bus, however. Even with all the extras, this laptop line still had some serious limitations which kept it from becoming as popular as it could have been. It only offered 16 bit pcmcia card support instead of the 32 bit cardbus that was available on other laptops at the time. Only 1MB of video ram was available, with no way to expand it. The BIOS of these machine is also quite buggy. Compaq never did fix the BIOS bugs, and I doubt they ever will, since the product line is abandoned now. -Toth

On Mon, 14 Jan 2002, Matt London wrote: Here in the US, I've picked up both styles of docking stations for around $10 used. The computers can typically be had for around $60-$150 depending on the model and what kinds of upgrades have been installed. Yes, they do tend to be a little on the expensive side. I've found these batteries do seem to last longer then the NiCads found in most other laptops made around the same time, however. I found a scrap dealer with some once, but he wanted *way* too much for them. IIRC, he wanted upwards of $150 each for them about a year ago. Right, the slim model did not feature the ISA slot. Both models of docking stations also offer a built-in RJ45 ethernet jack and a forward looking IR device. I've seen several 5000 series machines that would "hang" at bootup for up to several minutes when not in a docking station. They were attempting to find boot devices in multi-bays that are on the docking station. Their boot device order was set properly in the setup menus, but there seems to be a bug with the boot device selection. A couple more issues are related to the cdrom drive. Sometimes the 5000 series won't see the cdrom drive in the computer's built-in multi-bay. I've found that this most often would occur if a disc was in the drive when the machine was turned on. These systems also lack the ability to boot the cdrom drive. I'm not sure why Compaq didn't add this feature. -Toth