BeOS R5 On The Compaq Presario 1700T Notebook

Quick summary: A decently powerful laptop for programming and graphics work, but if you want to do anything with audio you're out of luck. Consult the color-coded table at the bottom of this page to get a quick overview of what does and does not work.

Manufacturer: Compaq computer, http://www.compaq.com/ Compaq has a bad habit of not keeping the spec sheets or even basic information about past products on their website; they will only have pages dedicated to their current machines readily available, and you'll have to slosh through the support archives to find any kind of useful information on a particular product.

Impressions: The 1700T comes in an Apple-esque styled case, black with a silver looking design down the middle (and an awful looking chrome Compaq logo in the center.) It weighs in at 5.1 pounds and is only 1.5" thick, fairly lightweight and compact considering how powerful it is. Look around on eBay and you can find one for a good price, as most people are moving to 1+GHz models now. Installing BeOS R5 on it was a breeze, the CD boots and it even recognized my USB mouse in the installation manager! I spent far more time trying to coax Windows 98 (for games, etc.) to live in the first partition than I did setting up BeOS.

The hard drive, incidentally, comes setup in three partitions - one for Windows, one for a "Restore" partition, and one spare for suspend/resume (I guess - bootman marks it as "unknown type.") I re-partitioned my system so that the first partition was 2GB for Windows, and the remainder of the 12GB drive was put into a second partition for BeOS. If you're going to make your system dual-boot, remember to do your partitioning first, then install Windows, and then finally install BeOS. Windows likes to be installed first, and this way the last thing you write to the MBR will be BeOS's bootman OS loader.

A word of warning: Compaq is evil and will not give you an OS CD (some flavor of Windows) with your laptop, even though you have a valid license key for it. What you get instead is a "Restore" CD that copies stuff over from the restore partition back to the main one -- so before you re-partition the system to use BeOS, backup all of your Windows stuff & the "Restore" partition; otherwise, you have no way to recover Windows and restore the factory default disk image (hey, you may want to when the time comes to sell the laptop :) ) Supposedly you can purchase (!) an actual OS CD from Compaq support for $10 or so, but I haven't verified that.

The "FutureBay" Floppy and CD-RW drives are surprisingly small and light, and very easy to interchange. Not being able to have both installed at the same time can be a little annoying when you first get the laptop, but for the most part it isn't something you'll notice - how often does anyone use floppy disks other than to do an initial OS install anymore? Also, while you can physically hot-swap the drives, BeOS won't know that they changed and so to "see" the drive, it has to be in the laptop at boot-time. (There may be a BIOS setting or other trick to get around this, I haven't looked into it.)

Good points: The display on this laptop is much better than the lower-end Presario Notebooks (1200, etc.) and the size of the screen - 14.1" - is very generous. Running at up to 1024x768, 32bpp, it's a very nice display. The Pentium III 700MHz gives it a good amount of speed, and the ATI driver from Bebits makes the graphics move at a very smooth rate. For this price, this is a very fast laptop for visual, computational or compiling work - the exact things I bought it for :)

Bad points: Biggest strike against this laptop is the lack of audio under BeOS... I tried a number of drivers in the ESS audio chipset family, and none of them worked. Using the PC squeaker driver is really horrendous, you have to be VERY desperate to hear something using it - there is a continuous, grating buzz/squeal while the driver is loaded, and you can barely hear any sounds being played. Another problem with the system is the lack of serial or PS/2 ports with system (you need to add a docking bay or use a USB-to-serial converter.) This also means that (if like me) you hate using laptop keyboards and touchpads, you'll have to use a USB mouse & keyboard (which work fine.)

There's only one PCMCIA slot, but it does work - which is essential if you want to communicate with anything, since you'll need the slot for a PCMCIA modem or ethernet card. I never really expect the built-in modem in any laptop to work, since they're all winmodems these days; but having the ethernet also be unsupported was a dissapointment. The S-video out would have been nice, but I suppose it's something that would have to be added to the ATI driver; in my experience viewing a computer screen on a TV looks terrible at all but the lowest resolutions, anyway. The ATI driver does support DirectDraw, though, which gives it speedy 2D graphics.

My previous laptop (a Presario 1200) had better audio support, but no graphics driver (VESA did work, though), and a much slower CPU - so I guess it's a tradeoff. Since I really don't do any audio work, trading sound for speed was worth it to me. The 1200 also used APM instead of ACPI, and not being able to power-down this laptop or check the remaining battery charge is annoying, but not something too difficult to get used to... The 1200 let me disable the laptop screen and only output to an attached monitor, and the ATI driver locks hard on the 1700 when I try to do this (but you can leave it displaying to both at once, it works fine.)

I'm annoyed that I have to boot into Windows to burn CDs, something that I had hoped would be supported in BeOS. Admittedly, I haven't done much research into getting this to work, so maybe in the future I'll find a way to do it; if you know of a way to get it to work, please email me :)

There's no IR port on this model, in case you were wondering.

Summary: I bought this laptop after doing my homework, and knew going into it that there would likely be no sound, modem, APM or ethernet support; since I primarily use my laptop for graphics work, email, web surfing & programming, this was fine for me. If you need sound, though, this laptop isn't a good choice.