Released in 1986 at a price of US$3499, the Portable II was much improved upon its predecessors. It included an 8 MHz processor, and was lighter and smaller than the Compaq Portable.

There were four models of the Compaq Portable II. The basic Model 1 shipped one 5.25" floppy drive and 256kB of RAM. The Model 2 added a second 5.25" floppy drive and sold for $3599. The Model 3 shipped with a 10MB hard disk in addition to one 5.25" floppy drive and 640kB of RAM for $4799 at launch. The Model 4 would upgrade the Model 3 with a 20MB hard drive and sold for $4999.[3]

There also may have been a 4.1 MB hard drive included at one point. The Compaq Portable II was significantly lighter than its predecessors, the Model 1 weighed just 23.6 pounds compared to the 30.5 pounds the Compaq Portable 286 weighed. Compaq only shipped the system with a small demo disk, MS-DOS 3.1 had to be purchased separately.