Restoration and use of the vintage $5,000 Compaq LTE laptop from 1997

Nowadays almost everybody can afford a laptop, prices are starting from about $50. But not so long time ago it was a sort of luxury item. How did it feel to use such a machine? The only way to get an answer — is to try.

Hardware

Those who are not interested in technical details, can skip this part and continue reading from the software testing.

It is absolutely no problem to find any computer specs on the Internet. I can easily read that the Compaq LTE laptop has a 100 MHz Pentium processor and 8 or 16 MB of RAM. But was it enough and sufficient at that time? Was it convenient to use the device? Basically, specs tell almost nothing about the real user experience. So I decided to buy a laptop on eBay and to test how it works on my own.

In general, there are two ways to find a vintage laptop. The first, and in my opinion is also the most boring way, is to pay a lot for the refurbished device. The price can easily be in the 500–1000$ range, which is even more than you pay for many modern laptops. The second and also the more challenging way is to buy a laptop and to restore it yourself. The price can be much lower, but it is even more important, that it is much more fun and the restoration itself also gives an opportunity to learn something new and…