Compaq Armada 1120

Compaq was well known brand of PCs, they made first portable PCs in 1980s, with CRT displays and later with "portable plasma" displays. In 1990s they still manufactured PCs, servers, portables and peripherals.
Armada line had always some "experimental", computers with non-standard solutions and strange applications. There were also cheaper models for business. This Armada has fast Pentium processor, not much RAM and no sound card. Its trackball is totally optical, not mechanical like mouse or as in earlier notebooks - here sensor shines directly on a ball. It looks like a notebook designed for text processing or office applications, but having computational power of Pentium processor. The same time there were better Compaq notebooks with better sound and video cards.
Personally, I think that Compaq made a big mistake doing one thing: BIOS setup is not in ROM. In ROM you have only the simple "error detected, boot setup or continue / fatal error, can't continue" procedure, the setup must be booted from floppy disk or special partition on hard disk (can be created with bootable setup disks, 4MB required). This is typical in many Compaq notebooks, Armada line and some Presario PCs. 

Manufacturer Compaq

Origin USA
Year of unit 1996
Year of introduction 1996
Type Laptop, PC
CPU Intel Pentium 100MHz
RAM 8MB onboard expandable to 24MB
Floppy Disk 3.5" 1.44MB internal
Hard Disk 800MB
Other media None
Graphics and display: VGA 640x480x16bit LCD TFT (model 1120T) or LCD CSTN (1120)
Chip: WD Paradise
Sound: PC Speaker
NO sound card
Keyboard and pointing device: Small PC keyboard without numeric part, numeric part on letter keys.

Trackball
OS: Windows 95

Power supply:

1 - Ground
2 - +16V DC
I/O:  - Serial port
 - Parallel port
 - VGA out
 - 2x PCMCIA
 - Dock connector
 
 
 
 
 
 
Possible upgrades: Memory up to 24MB probably with proprietary SODIMMs (or very picky about memory)
Additional peripherals:   

To replace BIOS battery: Just remove a whole front cover. Remove screws from bottom (don't remove these in back), unlatch locks and remove a whole keyboard, touchpad etc. Now you have access to HDD and BIOS battery (upper left corner).
If it doesn't turn on, you should check the fuse, it's a white rectangular thing in small socket on mainboard, look the lower-right from power socket.

Ah, one more useful thing - to turn it off press Ctrl-alt-Power  (or Ctrl-alt-Fn-Power) keys. To boot Setup press F10 at boot, if setup partition exists BIOS will flash a small rectangle in upper-right corner, if not boot from floppy.

 

Announcement
Reference guide
Hardware maintenance manual
BIOS update to 5K_0830.99 Rev. B WARNING! Improper flashing may damage your hardware!
NVR cleaner, Parallel port setup, QBasic fix
Setup and diagnostic disks
Setup for Windows 3.x
[WIN3x/9x]Drivers and utilities (VGA, patches, etc.)
[NT 3.51] VGA tools and drivers
[OS2]VGA tools and drivers You should also check High Resolution tool from NT3.51 package.