Compaq Armada
The Armada was a laptop model that was offered by Compaq for the business market. It was one of the thinner laptops during its time, at just 1.4 inches thick, but it had a lot of power, and could last a long time on one battery charge. Sadly, Compaq had to move on, and officially retired the Armada fleet in 2003.

There were over twenty different models of the Armada while it was being offered, from the 110, which was the initial model to go into production, to the M700, one of the last Armadas offered. This last version was one of the best, and it offered a Pentium III processor running at 1 gigahertz, and up to 576 megabytes of RAM, which were pretty high for that time period.

The M700 also had a modular bay, in which a variety of different devices could be inserted, including a floppy drive and a DVD ROM drive, which come included with the price. The user can also buy separately a second battery, a Zip 250 drive, or a second hard drive, all three of which will also fit into the modular bay, albeit not all at once.

In addition to those useful add-ons, the Armada M700 also offered all of the typical ports and connections associated with notebooks, including a modem, two PCMCIA card slots, and a network adapter, although not a wireless one. In addition, a composite video port resided on the back of the case if the user wanted to use a television as a monitor. Also convenient were the microphone and headphone jacks, not in the back of the computer as one might expect, but on the front of the case so they can be easily accessible. And although the stereo speakers are located in a strange place, in front of the keyboard on the side closest to the user, they did not pose a nuisance as they were flush with the case, and did not get in the way at all.

In a nutshell, the Compaq Armada line of notebooks was a very nice business laptop model during its time period. It had enough power to get things done, was portable enough, and had the required add-ons and connectivity devices. But it was time to move on, and with HP’s purchase of Compaq the two companies had to consolidate their computer lines to take advantage of the synergy between the two companies, and the Armada didn’t make the cut.