The MSI Wind is the latest entrant to the already overflowing ultra portable notebook market with the Asus EEE PC 700 / 900 / 1000, HP 2133 Mini Note, ACi Ultra Mini, Everex Cloudbook, HCL MiLeap fighting for market share and the Acer Aspire One and Dell 500 just about to enter. This promises to be a savage competition and is currently being led by the Asus EEE PC’s having the first mover’s advantage. The Asus EEE PC 701 was a runaway hit following its launch in 2007 and grabbed many awards including the “The most wanted Christmas Gift”. It was a favorite everywhere and created a new low cost, ultra portable notebook or “Netbook” category with many other manufacturers jumping in to offer their creations. Of these, the new MSI Wind seems to be the most promising one with its good balance of price, features and portability. It seems to be the only viable option to the EEE PC’s. The new range of EEE PCs namely the 900 / 1000 are priced a bit high, competing more with normal notebooks in terms of price. They aren’t very portable either like the EEE PC 701’s. In this review we look at the MSI Wind and check whether it manages to grab the crown from the ruling EEE PC’s.
MSI Wind U100 Specifications
- CPU: Intel ® N270 Atom 1.6GHz
- Operating System : Genuine Microsoft Windows XP Home
- Chipset: Intel ® 945GSE
- System Configuration Memory: 1GB
- 10”LCD panel, 1280x600 pixels with LED backlight.
- HDD 2.5", 9.5mm SATA HDD
- Keyboard 80 key keyboard/Touch Pad
- I/O Port USB X 3,Mic in, Earphone out, D-SUB RJ45, SD/MMC/MS/MS pro
- Audio Speaker x 2
- Bluetooth 2.0 built-in
- Web Camera 1.3M pixel web camera
- Networking: Wireless LAN 802.11b/g, 10/100 LAN
- Protection: Kensington lock
- Battery: Li-ion 2200mAh, Battery life 3.5 hrs (claimed)
- Dimensions: 260 x 180 x 19-31.5mm
- Weight 1.15kg
- 1 year RTB warranty
Design
The MSI Wind has a nice clean design and looks very similar to the white EEE PC with an almost similar layout and battery position. It has a glossy look and soft rounded edges which make it great to look at and work with. In all, it has a nice sombre look that looks great and likeable. It has an excellent build quality which is inspired from the Asus EEE PC and the HP Mini Note 2133. The build materials used are top quality which makes working with the MSI Wind U100 a pleasure. The MSI Wind has dimensions of 10.2″ x 7″ x 1.3″ and is slightly bigger than the EEE PC due to its larger 10″ screen. It is light and very portable at just 1.3 KG.
The MSI Wind houses a USB 2.0 port, a 4 in 1 memory card reader, mic and headphone jacks, a VGA port, and an Ethernet jack on the right side. On the left, you find 2 more USB 2.0 ports and the power jack and the fan exhaust. On the rear is the battery and the front is graced by cute little activity LEDs.
Review
The Wind comes in a variety of specifications with the differences being a choice of combination between Windows Home or Linux and 1GB or 512MB or RAM. The review machine ran Microsoft Windows XP Home. XP Home is not my favoured version of XP, but its choice for this application is a sensible one well-suited to modestly-specified hardware.
In use the machine proved to be very responsive at all times. The 1GB of RAM and 1.6 GHz Intel Atom cpu were more than amply sufficient for all tasks I threw at it. Applications launched quickly, menus popped up with no noticeable lag and boots times were very short. In general use it felt as fast as my dual core Toshiba laptop. I am the sort of geek who likes to strip out unnecessary clutter from operating systems and using something like XP Lite would probably yield some significant performance improvements again.
As a test of the Wind’s portability and usability I took it with me on holiday to the wilds of north-west Scotland with my very limited luggage aboard my motorcycle. The Wind was ideal - back at base in my hotel in the evening I was able to view high-quality photos I had taken on my travels and watch high-quality video filmed with my onboard camera, whilst picking up mails, doing a bit of surfing and drinking some very fine Isle of Skye Blaven beer in the bar. Fantastic – this is what the portable computing experience should be about.
The keyboard was spacious; it felt solid and better than many vastly more expensive laptops. It gave good tactile feedback and proved to be easy to use – again the best by far of any sub-note I have used. As one might expect, there’s a number of function keys situated on the top row of the keyboard to allow quick access to wi-fi/bluetooth, speaker mute, screen brightness and lock controls.
The mouse glidepad was good for a machine of this size and the mouse buttons I am pleased to say were the best of any sub-note that I have used to date – better than the Acer Aspire One or any of the Eees. Nothing more needs to be said.
The screen is a 1024x600 affair capable of displaying enough information for the sort of use intended. Unlike the M912 I reviewed it’s bright and sharp. It is also physically bigger than any other machine at 10” which, means that everything is bigger and clearer. I suffered no eye strain using it for several hours at a time.
Video and mp3 playback was faultless. As with all laptops the speakers were lightweight, but audio performance through headphones was just fine. This is a machine I would be happy to watch a movie on at any time. Several movies in fact.
The 80GB 2.5” SATA hdd was speedy and capacious enough. It was also divided into several partitions with one for the main operating system, one for data and another for backup purposes. I’m pleased to note that the latest revision of the Wind at the time of writing had received an upgrade to a 120GB drive for no price increase. Nice.
The MSI Wind comes with built-in 802.11/g wi-fi, Bluetooth and an Ethernet port to satisfy all connectivity requirements. For me these are essential and I suspect that this would be so for anyone else. There’s no firewire port, but one could argue that it’s superfluous on a machine that is unlikely to be used for video editing work.
The MSI Wind U100 battery is a 4400mAh item that proved to be disappointing when it came to endurance – lasting only for about 2hrs of general use. More could possibly be squeezed from it when using the “turbo battery” mode which basically downclocks the processor to 800Mhz, but as most drain is due to the hard drive and screen then I doubt it would deliver a significant improvement. This sort of life is perhaps the only chink in the Wind’s armour because its sheer usability encourages one to use it lots and this is only limited by the short battery life. The battery itself is housed very securely within the rear of the chassis which, adds to the overall feel of good quality.
One other disappointment is the lack of access to the hard drive bay and memory slots/s. Basically there is none – access would require the machine to be taken apart and would, of course, void the warranty. The good news is that with XP Home extra RAM is not really ever going to be necessary.
