The iPAQ Desktop Personal Computer in its various incarnations was a desktop computer produced by the Compaq Computer Corporation around the year 2000.

The Compaq iPAQ was primarily designed to be a portable desktop computer that had very few limitations on upgrading drives and RAM, although most, if not all, did not contain sockets for expansion cards. It featured a removable media bay that could accept a 3.5 inch floppy, a CD-ROM or other optical drives, or a secondary hard disk device. The slot (a Multi-Bay) was the same as those found on many Compaq Armada and many other hp\Compaq laptop computer systems.

By a method of convection for cooling, these computers are commonly found in office environments due to their low noise (dB) output.

The iPAQ ran on either an Intel Pentium 3 processor or on an Intel Celeron processor.

Internet Appliance

For a short time, around the year 2000, Compaq released a few models of an iPAQ that functioned as internet applicances, which, put simply, is just a device that is primiarily used to connect to the internet via a modem or through a LAN. The CRT model looked somewhat like an early iMac did, where the flat-panel model was much smaller and seemed to be more popular. They did not have the full functionality of a computer, such as that it had no CD-ROM tray and offered very few ports to connect to for very basic use.

There were two variants of the flat-panel IPAQs, a common Windows CE based version in a white case, and the less common blue version known as the Clipper. The Windows CE version was sometimes called the MSN Messenger and worked exclusively with the MicroSoft Network over a dial-up connection using the Win CE version of Internet Explorer. The Clipper appeared to be designed more for commercial environments and used a compact Unix-like operating system called BeIA. The built-in web browser application was a customized version of the Opera browser named "Wagner". The Clipper also included a standard 10baseT ethernet port, and shipped with the ability for the end-user to access the command line in order to tailor the device to use a company logo on the start-up screen. It also included a Minitel client for use where Minitel was available (mainly Canada and France).

External links

• PC Magazine: Article describing the functionalities of a Compaq iPAQ Internet Appliance

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