NEC VersaPro NX VA26C

 

I love browsing Yahoo Auctions. I end up stumbling upon some really cool stuff, and this time was no exception. 
This is a little 11inch NEC laptop, and what really caught my eye when I happened across it during my occasional search for cool old software on Yahoo Auctions, was that it has the exact same specifications as the Toshiba Libretto ff1100, but with a curious little slot that, upon further research, was confirmed to be a standard memory upgrade slot. It's also adorably thin! 
No one was bidding on it, probably because the opening price was "expensive" starting at 45$ CDN. Nevertheless, it included the original power supply, looked rather decent cosmetically, appeared to at least start into the BIOS. I had no idea what else to expect but I was really interested, especially when I later noticed something in the PCMCIA slot. 
With my limited self control, I went ahead and placed a bid. A couple days later I was informed that I had won the auction. 

Why did I buy this rather unremarkable system? 

The answer is simple : to run old Japanese (and EN) software. 

Why not use the Libretto ff you might ask? Well, it's not exactly the greatest thing to run newer software on. RPG maker games run pretty bad on it, it's a bit slow to use overall, the awkward screen resolution means that some applications wont display "nicely" on the screen, and the lack of any portability (aka no battery life) is a real mood killer. Oh, and the keyboard... That alone is pretty self explanatory. 
It's sad because I really want to be able to use the Libretto ff, but it just doesn't quite fit my needs. Maybe I'm just too picky...

Arrival of the system & first impressions

When I got the system I wasted no time plugging it in and seeing what would happen. Right away I noticed 3 problems. One somewhat concerning, the other 2 were as I expected (& 1 I had hoped for).
Problem 1 : The AC jack is sensitive to movement. I figured this was maybe a solder joint issues but later the suspicion shifted to the pin inside the AC adapter barrel as you will soon see. 
Problem 2 : Hard Drive actuator arm is stuck. Such a common issue with these old laptops from Japan for some reason... Once again the telltale symptoms of a stuck actuator arm. Platters spun up briefly, a clicking like sound in a pattern, abrupt shut down, and a bonus this time, coil whine!

Problem 3 : Dead CMOS battery. No surprises here, I'll check for leakage and see if I can "rebuild" it. 

Oh, now would be a good time to talk about what was in the PCMCIA slot. Just as I had suspected, a free PCMCIA to CF adapter with a free 512mb CF card, score! Still, I wonder why this was in there... Maybe transfer of files before decommissioning?

Teardown (yes, this is a guide)

With the help of this little hole in the wall blog, I had a general idea of how to take this thing apart. 
Since this, and another blog (will discuss it at the end of this entry) were only in Japanese, I figured I'd make an EN guide to help people out should they have this exact system. 

Step 1 : Remove the following screws (yes, there are screws under the rubber feet!). For the removal of the rubber feet, I suggest blasting them with a hair dryer on max heat and air for 30-40 seconds and gently using your nail to lift them. Upon removal, stick them to some wax cooking paper so you can stick them back on to the laptop base later. 

Step 1.1 : when you remove the black screw under the larger feet, you'll need to slide these little plastic shell pieces off. Left slides off to the left, right slides off the right. This will expose two more screws to remove.

Step 2 : Gently pull up on the keyboard, starting from the "top" part. There are two little bumps on the inner left and right top half of the frame/palmrest. These are what help recess the keyboard in place (even though it's also screwed in). 

Make sure to disconnect the keyboard ribbon cable!

Step 3 : Disconnect the 2 ribbon cables coming from the touchpad and connecting to the motherboard.
Now, gently lift up on the palm rest. It should give way very easily and come off almost effortlessly. If it doesn't, you have missed a screw. Check the bottom and make sure every screw I highlighted is removed. 

Hard drive removal : Gently lift the rectangular part of the hard drive cable that's attached to the motherboard. From here you can either remove the white ribbon cable from its ZIF connector and unstick the tape from the disk drive then LIFT the drive out OR you can unstick the black tape from the disk drive and carefully SLIDE OUT the drive. 

CMOS battery removal : Remove the highlighted screws, also be sure to disconnect the highlighted ribbon cable from its ZIF connector. From here you will want to gently lift up on this daughter board, there are two big connectors that it sits in, it will be difficult to remove, but do NOT apply a lot of force. 

The USB / CMOS battery daughter board.

A VL2320 battery, flat dead. Pull on the cables connecting it and pray that they don't snap or come out of connector. Seriously, what a stupid design. 
You can use any old 3V coin cell battery that is wired up for a laptop. I used a good working coin battery I pulled from a recycled laptop. Simply cut the connector off the donor battery, cut the wire from the dead battery (cut at the battery end, you are trying to preserve the connector of the dead battery) strip the wires, solder & shrink-wrap. 

My result. Battery is bigger, but is tucked away and not going anywhere. 

Hard Drive "repair" & data mining

After giving the hard drive a good smack on the ground, the actuator arm was no longer stuck and the drive sprung to life. I did some data mining and didn't really find anything interesting. It looks like this laptop had been used up to 2009 in some office. I didn't really have the time to sit down and attempt to translate the crazy compound kanji found in the documents as well as the owner name of the system. One document had a list of attendees for some sort of event, all of which were at least 50 years old at the time. A few documents mentioned something about a hospital, so it's possible this system was used in a hospital for HR related- 

stuff perhaps. I don't know, and I frankly don't really care as I am only interested in data mining systems that were used for personal use as they generally tell a story of what the system did for the person, what sort of adventures it might have went on, and a window into lifestyles from years now long forgotten. 

What was nice to see though, was that this was the factory install of Windows 98. NEC branding is present in the splash screen along with the system properties page. Sadly no funky 90s OEM branded wallpapers to be found. I don't believe the VersaPro came with any special OEM wallpapers as I am pretty sure the installs on these systems were generally very stripped down. The LaVie series got a lot more of the OEM branding and software from what I can tell. It's possible that the LaVie series was targeted to home users, and the VersaPro series was targeted towards business users. This is merely my speculation, though. With all that out of the way, I made a back up of the drive and flashed it to a bigger 12gb IBM drive. This system will have a lot of software put on it, so 3.2gb wont cut it. 

First boot

I buttoned everything up, and with great excitement I pushed the power button. I was greeted to the CMOS settings error once again, no problem. Press F2, and on the white screen with 3 prompts below the NEC logo, just press the right arrow key to get into this BIOS setup utility.
After setting everything up I saved, rebooted, and I was soon greeted to a Windows 98 splash screen, success! The install was rather unremarkable, so there isn't much else to say about it from here. I'm just thankful I don't need to go driver hunting. I also checked what as on the CF card in the PCMCIA->CF adapter and also nothing spectacular there. Looked like some sort of program was once installed on it, but no longer fully present. Here I was expecting some cool vintage arcade sort of software (it did say Konami after all) but no... Oh well, I won't turn down a "free" CF card. 

Performance VS the Libretto ff

Despite having LESS memory than my Libretto ff (more on that at the end) & a slower clocked CPU (266mhz vs 300mhz overclock), this system is considerably faster than the Libretto and I'm pretty sure I know why. It boils down to the chipset. 

The VersaPro NX uses a common Intel chipset, whereas the Libretto uses an inhouse Toshiba chipset. 

I'm guessing the Toshiba chipset was not quite designed with performance in mind. Due to the devices small footprint it also gets very hot as well, so I suspect thermal throttling measure are in place as well. 

On the other hand the NEC has a larger footprint and thus dissipates heat nicely. There's not even a fan to be found on this system. When I was testing Yume-Nikki I was astounded at how smoothly it was running. Despite the mere 32mb of RAM, the game was running great and load times weren't terrible either. Whereas the Libretto ff struggles to run this game smoothly and gets very hot kicking the fan on almost immediately. Despite the 64mb of RAM the game starts to bog down in certain areas after considerable play time, exhibiting some strange issue where when MP3 BGMs are loaded into the scene, each looping instance causes the drive to seek thus causing the game to freeze for a half of a second. 

When I said that this NEC and the Libretto ff had almost identical specs, I wasn't kidding. They have the same CPU (266MHz Mobile Pentium), exact same RAM spec and capacity (144pin EDO RAM) although the 32mb module that would have been present in my system (bringing it to 64mb) was robbed in its previous life and a NeoMagic MagicGraph 128XD (2MB版).

There is a difference in the audio hardware, and in my opinion it's far better than the Yamaha found in the Libretto ff. The NEC has an ESS AudioDrive which has seemingly great Sound Blaster compatibility unlike the Yamaha. When I loaded up DOOM2 I had both working music and sound right out of the box, albeit the midi of the ESS is not as nice as the Yamaha's. 

One area where the Libretto ff wins, and it's purely by circumstance, the display. Since my Libretto ff had only been used for 1.5~yrs the display is still nice and bright with great colors. The NEC, however, not so much. It has the typical backlight degradation you'd expect from a heavily used system. Not so bad where everything is discolored brown and it's pathetically dim on max brightness, but it's noticeable when going between the two systems. 

Closing remarks

I'm happy with this system and I am glad that the whole process went smoothly. From auction price, to intl shipping, to repair, to usage, this laptop has been a treat so far. But we aren't done talking about it just yet. There are a few things that need to be done to the system such as RAM upgrade and battery rebuild. I don't know if I'll make a new entry to the RAM upgrade, but I'll definitely talk about the battery rebuilding process. Thanks to another Japanese hole in the wall blog site, I was able to determine that the cells in this laptops battery pack are still being made and thus the pack can be rebuilt! I figure this would not only help with the AC jack issue, but also offer convenience while using this system. 

Also, when my memory upgrade comes in we are totally checking this out :)