Compaq Armada E500 Review



Upgrading a compaq armada e500 by jconner Apr 16, 2004 1:07AM PDT. I have an older E500 that i really like. It has served me well and it travels well meaning extreme.

Compaq Armada E500 Review

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.

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  2. Compaq Armada E500 - 14.1' - PIII - 64 MB RAM - 12 GB HDD overview and full product specs on CNET.
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Compaq Armada E500 Review Car And Driver

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.

  1. 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).
  2. Booted from ToriOS CD, chose ‘ToriOS verbose’ from the menu.
  3. Waited for desktop. Verbose output suggested the hardware detection was pretty good.
  4. Chose OBI Install to HDD from desktop.
  5. It’s not quite ‘one button install’, but close:
    1. double-click the icon
    2. Select ‘OK’ — I do want to toast the whole HDD, so no problem there
    3. Choose ‘select tarball’ and browse to /tarball and choose the ToriOS-i386-jessie.tar.gz tarball
    4. Choose ‘install’
    5. Confirm
    6. Confirm again.
    7. Choose the HDD to install to. Only one on my list anyway
    8. Check the ‘are you sure’ box and OK.
  6. Watch while the install program extracts the tarball.
  7. Set name and password for a user.
  8. Set timezone and locale information, including keymap.
  9. Do not install PAE kernel (computer is not on internet anyway), and do not update (ditto).
  10. Select device for bootloader (have no choice in my case).
  11. View install log (see below).
  12. Remove CD and reboot.
  13. 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.

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.

install.log

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Upgrade your Compaq Armada E500 with guaranteed compatible Compaq RAM memory. All Compaq Armada E500 Memory Upgrades are backed by a lifetime warranty.

Compaq Armada E500 Review Price

Manufacturer:Compaq
Model Name:Armada E500
HD Bus Type:
Standard Memory:64 MB (1 x 128 MB + 64 MB (soldered))
Max Memory:512 MB
Number of Sockets:2
Memory Comments:PC100 100Mhz SDRAM SO-DIMM 144-pin (Max 256 MB module)
ImageDescriptionManufacturerSizeSpeedPinsECCSKUPriceBuy
128MB DMS Certified Memory 144 Pin PC100 16x64 SDRAM SODIMM (8X16)DMS

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Compaq armada e500 review price

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