Compaq LTE 5000 series

The LTE 5000 series was a series of notebook-sized laptops under the LTE line manufactured by Compaq from 1995 to 1997. The LTE 5000 series was Compaq's first laptop with Pentium processors from Intel. The line of computers were co-developed between Compaq and Inventec of Taiwan and were manufactured entirely by Inventec overseas. The LTE 5000 series was the last generation in the LTE line, Compaq replacing it with the Armada line in 1997.

The LTE 5000 series was the fourth and final generation of LTE, a notebook family introduced six years earlier in 1989. The LTE 5000 series directly replaced Compaq's LTE Elite series that they had introduced in 1994. According to the press at the time, Compaq had poorly handled the rollout of the LTE Elite in 1994, discontinuing the production of its predecessor, the LTE Lite, months before they were ready to ship the LTE Elite to customers. Certain models of the LTE Elite line were fraught with technical issues, leading to several recalls. These factors and more contributed to a proportional shrinkage in Compaq's laptop market share, despite the company's total market share slightly increasing from 1993. No longer was Compaq the top laptop maker in the United States: Toshiba overtook them that year, helped along with their Satellite line of laptops.

As a result of this upset, in early 1995, Compaq hired Inventec of Taiwan to co-design and manufacture in full the follow-up LTE. The partnership not only hastened development of a successor but also gained Compaq access to Taiwan's more cutting-edge technologies in the field of mobile computer production. It was the first time in several years that Compaq relied on an outside company to design a portable computer of theirs and was the first machine Compaq had manufactured entirely in Taiwan. At the beginning of the LTE 5000 series' development, Compaq also scouted for new talent for its portable systems division while letting others go; for example, in January 1995, Compaq hired Jeff Greenberg away from Toshiba America Information Systems to be a product manager of theirs. Compaq's partnership with Inventec was not without its own issues, however, with Compaq engineer Greg Mora calling the process of communicating small but important refinements in design challenging on account of Compaq having no ownership of Inventec's factory.

The LTE 5000 series was a top-to-bottom redesign of the LTE line, with Compaq abandoning the ambitious internal AC adapter of the Elite line in favor of the familiar power brick. In its stead was what Compaq termed the MultiBay: a multipurpose, hot-swappable expansion slot in the front of the machine that allowed users to slot in a floppy drive, a CD-ROM drive (a first for the LTE line), a second hard drive for more disk storage, or a second battery for frequent travelers. Compaq also offered a full-feature docking station that added several other MultiBay units to the machine, on top of additional PC Cards and an Ethernet port.

The LTE 5000 series was the debut of Intel's multimedia-oriented Pentium processor in a Compaq laptop; as well, it was Compaq's first laptop with built-in 16-bit audio synthesis and playback (beyond the PC speaker); hardware acceleration for video; and an infrared port for communicating with PDAs. An optional MPEG decoder card also allowed the laptop to stream MPEG video in real-time as well as output video to television sets and projectors. Compaq used ESS Technology's Sound Blaster–compatible AudioDrive chips to handle audio and used OPTi's PCI-based Viper as the computer's video and general-purpose chipset. The LTE 5000 series abandoned the monitor-mounted trackballs of older models in favor of an implementation of IBM's keyboard-mounted pointing stick technology.

The polarizers of certain early-model LTE 5000 series machines with active-matrix LCDs were coated with a dark film intended to increase contrast when looked at straight-on while reducing visibility from far angles. This led to criticism from users who perceived the displays as overly dim, especially for an active-matrix display. Compaq replaced the backlight inverter of successor models with a higher-voltage unit in response to this criticism.

The Houston Chronicle's Dwight Silverman, reviewing the LTE 5100, called the display's refresh rate snappy, the hard drive's seek times "lightning-fast", and the keyboard's feeling "typically nice" for a Compaq portable. He deemed the laptop "excellent [for] anyone who has to do presentations on the road", with its hardware-accelerated graphics chip streaming video files flawlessly. Silverman had reservations with the display's brightness and relative heft of the machine, at 8 pounds (3.6 kg). Overall, he deemed the LTE 5100 "an everything-but-the-kitchen-sink approach to computer design [that] virtually bludgeons the competition with a mass of features". Silverman had similar opinions about its successor the LTE 5300, although noting that the brightness of its display was noticeably improved and praising the increased size of its display.

PC/Computing's Marty Jerome, reviewing the LTE 5100, gave the machine four-and-a-half-stars out of five. Like Silverman, Dwight praised its video performance while also highlighting its built-in speakers as "surprisingly good" in terms of range and stereo separation. Also like Silverman, Dwight drew attention to the machine's heaviness, writing that it "harken[ed] back to the days of laptops and throbbing shoulders", but found the keyboard layout "excellent" and welcomed the addition of a wrist wrest. Jerome called the optional CD-ROM drive slow for the time, at only 2× speed.