Compaq Armada e500 Is (Almost) Immortal

Apparently I cannot kill this laptop. Not bad for 2002.

By Ron Scott October 23rd, 2009

This “portable” laptop computer has been mine since July of 2008. I didn’t pay anything for it, and it certainly doesn’t owe me anything. According to the BIOS information it was manufactured in 2002, but 7 years later (probably three or four beyond the expected lifespan) it’s still chugging along for me.

The Armada e500 would have been a top-of-the-line notebook in its day. Sporting a 20GB hard drive, 128MB of SDRAM, and a Pentium III 500MHz processor, my estimate of an original pricetag is about $2000. Interestingly though, it was built to run Windows 98. If I was able to get this thing for free, and if it largely works the same as on day one, I’m doing pretty good. The only thing that I can see doesn’t work is the battery. This is obviously limiting to the portable aspect of this laptop’s usage, but I doubt an original working battery would have much of a charge after 7 years, anyways.

When I got this machine nearly a year and a half ago, it was running an achingly slow installation of Windows XP. After trying (and failing) to install ReactOS on it, I ended up choosing a xfce-ified Ubuntu to serve as the operating system. I say “xfce-ified” because it began as just Ubuntu 6.10, and I added the XFCE to it once I knew the installation was stable.

For about 9 months this setup ran smoothly and efficiently on the e500. Then one day I powered it up and received the harsh (but epic) warning message about imminent hard drive failure. So I reformatted and installed a stripped-down Windows XP Home. Several months later (yesterday, incidentally), the same message appeared at bootup – this time I was sure it was a goner. I couldn’t even get a Linux live CD to run. But I managed to reinstall XP and, for another undisclosed period of its life, am back online with it. It’s been an exciting and even slightly rewarding experience.

Technology sure has come a long way. I’m currently looking into buying a Apple Macbook Pro (2.26GHz, 2GB RAM) for university, which will probably set me back approximately $1600. I would imagine that the Armada e500 would have been purchased for similar purposes in 2002.

Is there really anything more epic than an “IMMINENT HARD DRIVE FAILURE” warning?

Tags: compaq, computer, dead, dying, hp, laptop, macbook, old