Is anyone familiar with this model or lineup of laptops? It was decent for it's time I believe so I'd still like to get it up and running just for fun.

I'm completely lost here and I have no idea what I can do at this point. There are three options, here they are in the order I've chosen: 1. Make sure it is set to boot on CD/Floppy/Whatever_you_want first.

You can get a PCMCIA interface card (now called simply PC interface) for an external CD. IIRC, that PC has no USB2 and even if it did, it wouldn't boot from a USB CD. For either type of drive, there is always the small chance that the IDE controller channel on the motherboard has died - I have seen this happen in rare cases. If they look OK then you probably have to suspect the drive itself. If it's an external drive then the advice is very similar - check out the connectors first. Unfortunately I cannot get into an OS to check if the data from the DVD drive is even working, so maybe something's wrong with the connection? I know it's old but I would still like to salvage it. So I have an old laptop that has been owned forever pretty much. What should I do? Tinynja98 said: I have absolutely no idea what this laptop is, but have you tried going into your bios and check for the boot device order? You can plug usb flash drives and other usb devices into a pcmcia slot - where your old wireless cards would plug into before laptops started becoming popular with internal wireless cards built in. I get the - Compaq Armada E500 Notebook question.ġ x parallel - IEEE 1284 (EPP/ECP) - 25 pin D-Sub (DB-25) 1 x serial - RS-232C - 9 pin D-Sub (DB-9) 1 x display / video - composite video output - RCA 1 x display / video - VGA - 15 pin HD D-Sub (HD-15) 1 x keyboard / mouse - generic - 6 pin mini-DIN (PS/2 style) 1 x docking / port replicator 1 x audio - line-out - mini-phone stereo 3.5 mm 1 x microphone - input - mini-phone mono 3.5 mm 1 x modem - phone line - RJ-11 1 x network - Ethernet 10Base-T/100Base-TX - RJ-45 1 x infrared IrDA 1 x USB 4 pin USB Type A Header › ∎∎ Compaq Armada E500 Drivers Win98 BootĬompaq armada e500 boot up when I power on the laptop it acts as if it is going to boot up normally.