This particular one cost me $15 on e-bay ($25 total with shipping) and was "untested as/is" but it ran straight out of the box. The only real problems were the usual cracking plastic (which is particularly WORSE on a P/75 because they started cheapening the design, with the biggest achilles heel being that blasted power control board coming loose, and the CPU board coming loose and losing all the CMOS settings). However, despite it's lousy design traits, it has a pretty interesting setup. I think this was one of the first scenarios where Intel actually made a purpose-built mobile chip for a laptop computer - see below...

If you look right above the internal speaker, that little pink square, that's the Pentium 75 CPU in this thing. No intel writing, no announcement. But it's a genuine Intel chip, SMD'd right to the motherboard. Crazy considering every Versa that came out before had a SMD 486 DX SL chip of some kind PROUDLY announcing it's low-power-consumption, high-powered-desktop-equivalent-processing high speed desktop-level CPU! "486 DX SL 33MHz" "486 DX SL2 40MHz" "Intel DX4" - the only way you'd know this thing was "genuine Intel" is if you ran some kind of motherboard identification or Windows 95 which then it identifies it as a "Genuine Intel Pentium 75MHz".

And what's hilarious about this machine is it's "PENTIUM" in name only. What most people think of as a Pentium era laptop, is a touchpad equipped on the palmwrest, tiny bezel beneath the screen, 10.4" or larger LCD in DSTN or Active Matrix color, a Lithium Ion battery, Cardbus PC Cards, and memory that comes on something similar to the SODIMMs we still use today. Not a boxy 2" thick gray laptop computer with 2 PCMCIA Type II 16-bit slots, a trackball, no Windows logo keys, a 9.4" LCD at squint-your-eyes 800x600 pixels at 256 color depth, a VESA 2.0 1MB SVGA Graphics Chipset (C&T 65545 - same as the Versa M series). It's basically a NEC Versa M/75 with a Pentium core slapped in it, and the TC functionality removed to make room for an ESS AudioDrive 688 SoundBlaster 16 compatible audio chip with OPL/3 FM Synthesis - now THERE is the real improvement, lol.

But that's not to say the Versa P/75 is a bad computer by any stretch of the imagination. It got enough flogging by the PC Magazine press in 1995 for being a part of "NEC's antiquated VERSA design". See, the NEC Versa started with the Ultralite Versa in 1993, in a time when most laptop computers were 386 SL based devices with monochrome screens, costing in the $3000 price range, with graphics and hard disk performance comparable to some 286 desktop machines of the late 1980's. Heck, go look at the FMA3500....that's literally a 486 as an 80's laptop, and that's actually an impressive machine in it's time. But by 1995, the early 1990's were over - Kurt Cobain was dead, Grunge was Dead (in the mainstream at least and you know how I feel about the mainstream), People were already ragging on SUV's for unstable tires, OJ Simpson was the national obsession, and WIndows 95 of course, was the most important computer-related thing next to Al Gore's funding of the expansion of the Internet! If something like this had come out in 1993....it would have cost $10K and beaten everything's ass on the market - even IBMs ThinkPads! But in 1995, everyone was moving to that yucky rounded 90's aesthetic. Personally, this is the only Pentium I would like to own.

But that said, the performance is not that much better than the M/75. Sure, I have SoundBlaster and OPL/3, but in the end, it's still just a 486 Laptop with a Pentium chip in it. It is SLIGHTLY Faster, I'll give it that, but still, runs Postal about the same, runs most high-weight Windows 95 games using Direct X the same. It still has all the same chipset and controllers as the VErsa M/75: a Cirrus Logic PCMCIA Controller chipset (same one) that's for PCMCIA Type I/II/III cards, the same C&T Graphics Chipset that's a 65545 chip with 1MB SVGA, still the same PICOpower and NEC custom silicon in it. It's not bad, it's just not as much as a later Pentium laptop would be for the same task. I mean c'mon man, this thing SHIPPED with Windows 3.11 and DOS on it, not Windows 95 originally. That did not come till about March/April 1995. So due to the screen, and it's placement, it has Windows 95 on it as my dedicated 95 machine. Oddly I got The Sims to run on it at one point, LOL.

Honestly, the worst thing about this one though is the plastic. NEC omitted much of the structural integrity. Some of this was for proper ventilation of hte Pentium CPU, even the aluminum caging was changed with a proper Heat Pipe running from the CPU to a vent under the power controller board. The problem is, the vent weakens structural integrity of the whole case, the keyboard screw that used to go through the bottom, through the power boards, and into the keyboard, is now replaced with a single plastic coarse thread screw to steak the power board on (which then cracks free and causes a "no-start" condition). As such, this laptop is heald together HEAVILY with baking soda and superglue. So much so I made a 3 hour long YouTube video of me doing the initial fixes.