Compaq Armada E500. Pentium III and about 400MB RAM, new 40GB IDE HDD. Sticker saying ‘Designed for Windows 2000’ but no OS. It is old enough to have a floppy disk drive and only one USB port — it comes from that brief time when the floppy had not yet died but the USB was around. Quite a good spec machine for the day.
Compaq Armada E500 - 15' - PIII - 128 MB RAM - 20 GB HDD overview and full product specs on CNET. Holiday Gift Guide 2020. Best gifts under $30. (Armada E500 only) Release the ZIF connector that connects the pointing stick cable 11. (Armada E500 only) Disconnect the pointing device cable from the system board Figure 5-9. Page 99: Memory 5.8 Memory The Compaq Armada E500 and Armada V300 Series feature two memory expansion slots, located under the keyboard. Compaq Armada E500, Pentium III + Docking station, chargers, keyboard, monitor. $108.90 shipping. WORKING Compaq Armada M700, Pentium II, 352MB, 74.5GB HD WindowsXP, with charger. $28.95 shipping. Compaq Armada 1750 VINTAGE Laptop Intel Pentium II - NO HDD/Caddy.
ToriOS is a non-PAE Linux distribution, the install image based on Debian 8. It is designed to suit computers that would have come with Windows xp, which is now even more of a security problem than it was when it was maintained. Since this old thing would have run with xp if asked, and came with 2000 which is a kind of ‘xp before xp’, ToriOS seems like a good choice.
Here is the process of installing it on the Armada — note that the computer was offline at the time.
- Removed all USB sticks (there’s only 1 plug), entered the BIOS (just hit function and delete keys on bootup until something worked) and made sure that the multibay (ie the CDROM drive) was before the HDD in the boot order (HDD already had ReactOS on it, but I was looking to toast it).
- Booted from ToriOS CD, chose ‘ToriOS verbose’ from the menu.
- Waited for desktop. Verbose output suggested the hardware detection was pretty good.
- Chose OBI Install to HDD from desktop.
- It’s not quite ‘one button install’, but close:
- double-click the icon
- Select ‘OK’ — I do want to toast the whole HDD, so no problem there
- Choose ‘select tarball’ and browse to /tarball and choose the ToriOS-i386-jessie.tar.gz tarball
- Choose ‘install’
- Confirm
- Confirm again.
- Choose the HDD to install to. Only one on my list anyway
- Check the ‘are you sure’ box and OK.
- Watch while the install program extracts the tarball.
- Set name and password for a user.
- Set timezone and locale information, including keymap.
- Do not install PAE kernel (computer is not on internet anyway), and do not update (ditto).
- Select device for bootloader (have no choice in my case).
- View install log (see below).
- Remove CD and reboot.
- Login as user — no worries. Looks good.
Summary — completely painless and as advertised. Took about half an hour, not too bad at all on an old machine. I have not yet added extra software, but there are one-button installers to do that. Also, the very light-weight install is quite snappy, at least for minor desktop tools. Need to explore use of heavier software still.
Compaq Armada E500 Review Manual
So I’ve not lived with ToriOS on the old machine, but the install could hardly have been easier. Of course, I did choose a simple one-partition install rather than making it share the disk.
Compaq Armada M300
install.log