NEC VersaPro VK27MD-J Hinamizawa

An unusual laptop that I own since May of 2025. Made by NEC in Japan, with a Japanese layout keyboard, I believe this is a JDM laptop that has somehow made its way over to my country. It is my daily driver laptop, and it was a pretty good deal to boot. Notable specifications include:

Excluding shipping costs, the laptop cost only 25 euro and was listed as damaged. One such fault, and the most intrusive one, was the CPU with a faulty core. The laptop would boot to bios, but trying to boot into an operating system resulted in a boot loop, going back to the bios splash as soon as the OS began booting. Appending maxcpus=1 to the kernel command line and updating GRUB2 fixed the issue, but obviously I was then limited to just one core and one thread. I bought a replacement CPU for ~5 euro, same model, and it happens to work fine to this day.

The second issue was the odd lack of a Wi-Fi card, but even more strangely, missing antennas for it. Goes without saying, but removing the antennas would require tampering with the lid which houses them, yet I saw no signs of intrusion. The only possible explanation I can think of is that it came with no Wi-Fi card and antennas from the factory, possibly due to different bands and wireless regulations in Japan compared to Europe. But then again, why would it have the keyboard in Japanese layout, if it was destined to end up elsewhere? At any rate, I took care of the problem by harvesting the antennas from one of my broken laptops I got from e-waste, stuffing them inside of the laptop around the area of where the Wi-Fi card ought to be installed. For the Wi-Fi card, I used an Intel one harvested from yet another e-waste laptop. Not an ideal solution, as the signal is slightly weaker than usual, however it was by far the easiest and fastest fix, and I didn't feel like tinkering with screen assembly and the lid.

The Wi-Fi card ghetto fix The ghetto fix (click for full size image)

The final real flaw I could find was a broken plastic thread for one of the screws that secure the service door. It can still be screwed in, but the plastic won't hold onto anything but the part of the thread in the motherboard. Fortunately, the remaining screws are still enough to secure the service door.

Update: CPU fan woes

At some point, it started to rattle quite a lot, as if rubbing against something. It not only made a lot of noise, but also decreased efficiency, resulting in temperatures nearing 100 °C during high loads. Alas, this sort of fan of course isn't easy to find anywhere. Even if the fan type and connector are the same, the screw mount positions are not. As a last resort, I opened the fan assembly by cutting the plastic rivets, removed the metal cover and poured a few drops of sewing machine oil into the hole on the picture. Now I know that in theory, those sorts of fans aren't meant to be serviced, but to my surprise it worked to fix the problem, and to this day it works fine. For security, I used some pretty strong painter's tape to hold the metal cover in place, since the plastic rivets are no longer there.

CPU fan disassembled, where I poured the machine oil Disassembled CPU fan, and where I poured the machine oil CPU fan put back together Now put back together, metal cover secured with tape

Daily driver review

Being a Haswell based laptop, it's perfectly suitable for almost anything but performance intensive tasks. Unlike my Core 2 Duo ThinkPad, where occasional stutters could be experienced, slowdowns are very rare here. It can handle youtube videos in 1440p or HEVC encoded anime in 1080p with profile=high-quality in mpv (it does struggle with upscaling, so I suggest sticking to the default profile). For older games, the performance is also acceptable. The most demanding one I've tried, NFS:U 2, ran smoothly in 1080p on low settings. It could probably handle higher settings on lower resolutions.

Thermals

Thermals on the other hand are not ideal; doing nothing, the laptop idles at around 50 °C, with PCM-1 (PTM7950 rebrand) and undervolted by -90 mV. Fan tends to turn on often, although it's relatively quiet and I've never seen the temperatures exceed about 70 °C under load. It's the idle temperatures that I have the biggest problem with, as I deem them slightly excessive, likely owed to thermal inefficiency of the Haswell architecture and a basic heatsink consisting of just a single pipe.

Display

A Full HD LCD panel is arguably this laptop's biggest selling point. I've found that pretty much any laptop with a decent panel costs considerably more than what I've paid for mine, and even then you're likely getting an IPS panel with only about 60% sRGB gamut coverage. The TN panel from LG used here has sRGB coverage of 86% and contrast ratio of just under 900:1. Could be better, but usually for this price you're getting a laptop no better than this one, with a panel of gutter oil tier quality. This is still a definitive upgrade from that, and compared to IPS panels found in most other business laptops the only real shortcoming are the viewing angles, which nevertheless are decent for a TN panel. No huge visibility issues here. For this size, 1080p is just about on the border of being comfortably usable without scaling, at most with a larger font size. If it was 14", I expect it would be too high DPI for me to use comfortably without scaling or using an even larger font size, and at that point I'd have to give up bitmap fonts.

Input devices

The keyboard leaves a bit to desire - it is an island-style keyboard, with moderate travel and tactility. It's far from being as tragic as chiclet keyboards found in modern laptops, but it's nonetheless quite rattly, some keys fail to register if you don't press them hard enough (might be due to wear?), overall a mediocre typing experience. The Japanese layout, as cool as it looks, is not at all practical for me either. The touchpad is just ok; large and precise enough to use comfortably, although two-finger scrolling leaves a lot to be desired (might be a configuration issue and not necessarily a fault of the touchpad). For mouse buttons, there are the standard two plus one for scroll, which is quite welcome.

I/O

Ports on this laptop are fantastic. Featuring 5 USB 3.0 ports on all sides, HDMI, VGA, Ethernet, SD card reader, ExpressCard, headphone and microphone jacks, an optical drive, and oddly enough for a laptop this recent - a serial port. Nothing missing here and nothing to complain about.

Minor features

Build quality and servicing

Plastics quality and tolerances are on par with most other mid-range laptops. There are some small tolerance issues and squeaks, but nothing major. It doesn't feel like it's going to crumble apart just from looking at it. On the other hand, some plastic parts like the palm rest seem to have a sort of rubberised coating, which didn't hold up all that well, leaving some obvious wear spots (at least it's not sticky). Keyboard keycaps are run of the mill ABS, so a lot of them are quite shiny by now. Lid hinges seem to be of decent quality, one on each side kind of like in ThinkPads. All user replaceable parts are hidden behind one large service door, secured with six philips head screws. Past that, no further disassembly is needed; RAM, CPU heatsink, BIOS battery, etc. - all exposed and easy to remove. Far superior to the insanity of ThinkPads where you need to disassemble half of the laptop just to access the CPU.

Conclusion

Overall a solid laptop, especially given how little I paid for it. Other than being from Japan, it's not that unique compared to any other business laptop, so to me it's hardly a collector's item or anything of the sort. It gets the job done, has a decent screen and even a working battery in good condition, so for 25 euro the value is incredible and a good upgrade from the Fujitsu A512 I used previously. You're unlikely to ever find one outside of Japan, but if you do, I can recommend it if the price is right. But do keep in mind that you're even less likely to find spare parts for it, so if anything serious breaks (like the keyboard), it'll become paperweight.

inxi -e and fastfetch output

System:
  Host: hinamizawa Kernel: 6.12.73+deb13-amd64 arch: x86_64 bits: 64
  Desktop: Xfce v: 4.20.1 Distro: Debian GNU/Linux 13 (trixie)
Machine:
  Type: Laptop System: NEC product: PC-VK27MDZDJ v: N/A
    serial: xxxxxxx
  Mobo: NEC model: Justice3-SH v: 3A3B serial: xxxxxxx
    UEFI: NEC v: NOTE Version /745A2302 date: 05/29/2014
Battery:
  ID-1: BAT1 charge: 52.7 Wh (100.0%) condition: 52.7/62.6 Wh (84.1%)
    volts: 3.8 min: 10.8
CPU:
  Info: dual core model: Intel Core i5-4310M bits: 64 type: MT MCP cache:
    L2: 512 KiB
  Speed (MHz): avg: 798 min/max: 800/3400 cores: 1: 798 2: 798 3: 798 4: 798
Graphics:
  Device-1: Intel 4th Gen Core Processor Integrated Graphics driver: i915
    v: kernel
  Display: x11 server: X.Org v: 21.1.16 driver: X: loaded: modesetting
    unloaded: fbdev,vesa dri: crocus gpu: i915 resolution: 1920x1080~60Hz
  API: EGL v: 1.5 drivers: crocus,swrast
    platforms: gbm,x11,surfaceless,device
  API: OpenGL v: 4.6 compat-v: 4.5 vendor: intel mesa v: 25.0.7-2
    renderer: Mesa Intel HD Graphics 4600 (HSW GT2)
  Info: Tools: api: eglinfo,glxinfo de: xfce4-display-settings x11: xdriinfo,
    xdpyinfo, xprop, xrandr
Audio:
  Device-1: Intel Xeon E3-1200 v3/4th Gen Core Processor HD Audio
    driver: snd_hda_intel
  Device-2: Intel 8 Series/C220 Series High Definition Audio
    driver: snd_hda_intel
  API: ALSA v: k6.12.73+deb13-amd64 status: kernel-api
  Server-1: PipeWire v: 1.4.2 status: active
Network:
  Device-1: Intel Ethernet I217-LM driver: e1000e
  IF: enp0s25 state: down mac: xxxxxxx
  Device-2: Intel Centrino Advanced-N 6205 [Taylor Peak] driver: iwlwifi
  IF: wlp2s0 state: up mac: xxxxxxx
Drives:
  Local Storage: total: 119.24 GiB used: 108.72 GiB (91.2%)
  ID-1: /dev/sda vendor: SanDisk model: SD6SB1M-128G-1006 size: 119.24 GiB
Partition:
  ID-1: / size: 12.48 GiB used: 8.38 GiB (67.2%) fs: xfs dev: /dev/dm-1
  ID-2: /boot size: 913 MiB used: 142.2 MiB (15.6%) fs: xfs dev: /dev/sda2
  ID-3: /boot/efi size: 974.1 MiB used: 8.8 MiB (0.9%) fs: vfat
    dev: /dev/sda1
  ID-4: /home size: 98.69 GiB used: 96.78 GiB (98.1%) fs: xfs dev: /dev/dm-3
Swap:
  ID-1: swap-1 type: partition size: 6.02 GiB used: 3.41 GiB (56.6%)
    dev: /dev/dm-2
Sensors:
  System Temperatures: cpu: 51.0 C mobo: N/A
  Fan Speeds (rpm): N/A
Info:
  Memory: total: 8 GiB available: 7.67 GiB used: 6.61 GiB (86.1%)
  Processes: 302 Uptime: 6d 20h 42m Shell: Bash inxi: 3.3.38
  
        _,met$$$$$gg.          rika@hinamizawa
     ,g$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$P.       ---------------
   ,g$$P""       """Y$$.".     OS: Debian GNU/Linux 13 (trixie) x86_64
  ,$$P'              `$$$.     Host: PC-VK27MDZDJ
',$$P       ,ggs.     `$$b:    Kernel: 6.12.73+deb13-amd64
`d$$'     ,$P"'   .    $$$     Uptime: 6 days, 20 hours, 43 mins
 $$P      d$'     ,    $$P     Packages: 2276 (dpkg), 12 (flatpak-user)
 $$:      $$.   -    ,d$$'     Shell: bash 5.2.37
 $$;      Y$b._   _,d$P'       Resolution: 1920x1080
 Y$$.    `.`"Y$$$$P"'          DE: Xfce4 4.20
 `$$b      "-.__               WM: Xfwm4 (X11)
  `Y$$b                        WM Theme: Bluecurve-BerriesAndCream
   `Y$$.                       Theme: Bluecurve-BerriesAndCream [GTK2/3/4]
     `$$b.                     Icons: Bluecurve [GTK2/3/4]
       `Y$$b.                  Terminal: xfce4-terminal 1.1.4
         `"Y$b._               Terminal Font: Terminus Medium 12
             `""""             CPU: Intel(R) Core(TM) i5-4310M (4) @ 3.400 GHz
                               GPU: 4th Gen Core Processor Integrated Graphics Controller
                               Memory: 6737 MiB / 7856 MiB

TODO: add pictures