MSI Wind Review

by Kevin O'Brien

Now that the MSI Wind has finally started to trickle out to consumers, we were finally able to get our hands on one of these for review. The Wind is another mini notebook in a field originally started by the ASUS Eee PC, but with one primary catch: It is priced well under the equivalent Eee PC. Now having a better price doesn't always mean you are going to win in any given market, but the MSI really outdid themselves and created a great mini notebook. Read on to see just how much ASUS should fear the MSI Wind.

Specifications

• 1.6GHz Intel Atom Processor
• 10" WSVGA (1024 x 600) LCD
• Windows XP Home Operating System
• Intel GMA 950 Integrated Graphics
• 1GB 667MHz DDR2 Memory
• 80GB 2.5" SATA Hard Drive
• Wireless: 802.11b/g and Bluetooth 2.0
• 3-Cell 11.1v 2200mAh Battery
• Size: WxDxH 10.2" x 7" x 1.3"
• Weight: 2lbs 8.6oz

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Build and Design

The MSI Wind really has a great look and feel to it. The soft rounded edges coupled with the glossy texture make it easy and comfortable to grip onto, while also giving the mini notebook a very professional look. Another great aspect of the Wind is nothing appears "look at me" flashy, making it very appealing to business professionals, as well as children and teenagers alike. No chrome is found anywhere, and all the labeling and branding is a light grey which really goes well with the pearl white finish.

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Build quality is excellent, and reminds me very much of the HP Mini-Note. Fit and finish is top notch with smooth and tight plastic seams, beveled edges, recessed hinges, and plenty of touches here and there that make you feel as if you are getting every penny's worth of notebook from MSI. The quality of the plastics used is top notch, and most thick enough to prevent flex even under a firm grip. The LCD cover and palmrest show no flex under heavy pressure, but the bottom panel is thin in a few spots and easy to bend. Not a deal breaker by any means, but I'm just saying it might not hold up well to being run over by a car.

Display

The Wind has a LED backlit matte textured LCD. It is very bright and easy to read, and rates very well to others screens I have used. Colors are vibrant and contrast is excellent. On the flip side, the screen does have the infamous sparkly texture to it giving solid colors a dirty look, and on high backlight settings you can see some backlight bleed and almost make out each individual LED. None of those drawbacks would be enough to make me not buy one, but it might be enough for someone to give it a second thought it they were more on the obsessive side of things.

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Viewing angles are just how I like them, wide in both vertical and horizontal planes. I have always found it kinda funny that "cheap and affordable" subnotebooks can always manage to beat out multimedia powerhouses in this screen aspect. With some screens inverting colors or going distorted with minimal vertical movement, the MSI Wind's LCD keeps colors true until much steeper angles. I could say you could probably go 45-50 degrees above or below the screen before you might want to reconsider your seating position. Horizontal viewing angles were not as good as the vertical, with the screen appearing much darker in side viewing positions. The colors didn't exactly invert, but screen was dark enough to become unwatchable for secondary viewing buddies who you might be sharing a movie with.

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Sunlight readability for those who might adventure into the wilderness on occasion is fairly good. At full brightness the screen should still be readable. Below is a comparison between the MSI Wind, Lenovo T60, and Dell D630. The Wind is a good deal brighter than the other two notebooks.

Keyboard and Touchpad

The MSI Wind really shines with its keyboard, and taking up almost every inch of space side to side to have the largest possible keys on such a small device. The keyboard takes all but 2-3mm of space going side to side, and is really great to type on even with large hands. The only big flaw I can find with the keyboard is the super narrow ",", ".", and "/" keys which are 2/3 the width of standard letter keys. This threw me off at first trying to type in websites, and hitting the "/" key instead of a period. Once you got used to the layout it wasn't as much of a problem, but come on, why ruin such a good thing? The shift keys on both sides should have been reduced in size by half and still been perfectly fine, and you wouldn't have to have 2/3 size symbol keys.

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The touchpad is slightly recessed from the palmrest by about 1mm, giving a defined lip around the entire perimeter. For small touchpads this can be very handy, letting you keep your finger inside the detection zone, and not always slipping out accidentally. As far as touchpads go, the sensitivity is great, letting you slide your finger along without excessive pressure for perfect tracking. At times the preset vertical and horizontal scrollbars messed with that perfection, making the mouse veer far from the intended path, but with a few adjustments peace was restored. The touchpad buttons consist of a single see-saw bar, ala early Eee PC, with shallow feedback and a semi-soft click. The clicking noise could probably best be described as a Microsoft Intellimouse clicking inside a sock.

Missing Features

After my hands on with the ASUS Eee PC 901 and the Hybrid Engine that allowed you to overclock the Intel Atom processor for about a boost in power, I really wanted to see what the MSI Turbo feature could do. Those who managed to get pre-release models of the MSI Wind saw gains using it, but as luck would have it MSI pulled this feature out before they started shipping to consumers. The FN+F10 overclocking feature is no more, and replaced with a simple "ECO feature" that switches between battery saver mode at 800MHz and normal mode which dynamically switches between 800MHz and 1600MHz depending on processor load.

Performance

System performance--with great help of Intel Atom processor--was stellar. Boot times into Windows XP were on par with many full-size notebooks, and casual use programs opened up without any lag. The subnotebook experience is basically identical to what you would find on a regular notebook, minus the gaming or fast photo editing. Programs like Internet Explorer, Firefox, Pidgin, Word, and Excel all open up just as fast and work just as well as you would expect on a modern computer.

Items that fall into a more intensive category like Gimp, Half-Life 2, or 720p video content don't work as well. Gimp worked great for basic photo editing, but some tasks took much longer than they did on my Core 2 Duo system. Half-Life 2 and the HD video content played anywhere between 1-5FPS and were quite horrific. The Wind just doesn't have the horsepower for really intensive activities.

The normal benchmarks we use here at NotebookReview.com were thrown out of the window for the MSI Wind for various problems associated with the platform, so we chose to use a few creative alternatives. Futuremark 3DMark03 made a short comeback, as well as FPS tests inside the original Half-Life.

3DMark03 Graphics Performance Benchmark (higher scores indicate better performance):

Notebook	3DMark03 Results
MSI Wind (1.6GHz Intel Atom, Intel GMA 950)	589 3DMarks
Lenovo ThinkPad T60 (2.16GHz Intel Core 2 Duo T4400, ATI X1400 128MB)	4,622 3DMarks

wPrime processor comparison results (lower scores mean better performance):

Notebook / CPU	wPrime 32M time
MSI Wind (Intel Atom @ 1.6GHz)	124.656 seconds
Asus Eee PC 901 (Intel Atom @ 1.8GHz)	111 seconds
Asus Eee PC 900 (Intel Celeron M ULV @ 900MHz)	203.734 seconds
HP 2133 Mini-Note (Via CV7-M ULV @ 1.6GHz)	168.697 seconds
Asus Eee PC 4G (Intel Celeron M ULV @ 630MHz)	289.156 seconds
Asus Eee PC 4G (Intel Celeron M ULV @ 900MHz)	200.968 seconds
Everex CloudBook (VIA C7-M ULV @ 1.2GHz)	248.705 seconds
Fujitsu U810 Tablet PC (Intel A110 @ 800MHz)	209.980 seconds
Sony VAIO VGN-G11XN/B (Core Solo U1500 @ 1.33GHz)	124.581 seconds
Sony VAIO TZ (Core 2 Duo U7600 @ 1.2GHz)	76.240 seconds
Dell Inspiron 2650 (Pentium 4 Mobile @ 1.6GHz)	231.714 seconds

Since Half-Life was released in a time when system requirements were laughable by today's standards, it ended up working great on the Atom-based Wind. A frame rate of 59-61 frames per second (FPS) were common in most situations with the system setup in "normal" mode, and 25-30FPS in "eco" mode.

High Definition video playback is not really possible on the Intel Atom processor besides select movies. Most sources have bitrates that are too much for the processor to handle when decoding, and I barely broke over 6-8FPS throughout my video collection. Regular 480P video played just fine, so all hope was not lost. It will probably take a significant speed bump or new video chipset before these subnotebooks can handle HD content without stuttering.

While the Wind doesn't have the low latency SSD advantage of the Eee PC, it does come out on top with higher overall transfer speeds with the spinning drive. Wind users also have an advantage with nearly quadruple the storage space, and an easy and cheap upgrade path if they so chose.

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What Heat and Noise?

For a user who has put up with super hot keyboards and bottoms of subnotebooks far too long under the excuse of "it's small and space cramped," the MSI Wind was a huge surprise. After sitting on for on for a couple of hours in normal mode while plugged in, the bottom of the notebook was 90-94 degrees Fahrenheit, and the keyboard was below that. Compared to the Eee PC 900 which broke 100 degrees on the bottom and 105F on the keyboard, this is a huge advantage. For someone like a writer who might spend hours on a keyboard typing away on the road, not having your fingertips sweat like crazy is a incredible feature.

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Fan noise is completely silent at best and minimal at worst ... and seemingly always running in the background. This is probably one of the big reasons the MSI Wind runs at reasonable temperatures, as it always has some air flowing through to carry away excess heat.

Ports and Features

The MSI Wind has a laundry list of features, including everything you would expect to find on a full-size notebook. Key features include 802.11b/g wireless, Bluetooth 2.0, Webcam, and a card reader, with USB, VGA, LAN, and audio making notable appearances. While Firewire would have been nice to see, it was understandable to be missing, with an already crowded port selection on each side.

Front: Activity indication lights

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Rear: Battery

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Left: Kensington Lock slot, AC Power, CPU Exhaust, 2 USB

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Right: 1 USB, SD Card Reader, Headphone/Mic, VGA, LAN

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Audio

Speaker quality on the Wind makes most full-size notebooks sound like full surround sound systems. They work well enough if you have to watch a YouTube clip or listen to system sounds, but it doesn't have any purpose beyond that. Volume levels can't get high enough, and you are missing all midrange without even a hint of bass. The headphone jack provides a great alternative though and comes highly recommended.

Ease of upgrades

Currently any upgrade beyond swapping the battery for one with a larger capacity will void your warranty. For those who accept that risk, popping open the bottom half of the MSI isn't that hard at all. Remove all the exposed screws on the bottom (including the one under the warranty void sticker), and use a fingernail around the perimeter to release the plastic clips.

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I found it easier to unlatch the rear portion first, lift up the left side, and wiggling the right side free. To clear the VGA port on the right side you need to slide the bottom half in that direction, instead of lifting directly up. Once the plastic shell is removed you have full access to any component that could be swapped out. This includes the wireless card, 2.5" SATA hard drive, and adding additional RAM to the open DDR2 slot. The included 1GB of RAM is soldered onto the motherboard, so you are stuck with that for the life of the subnotebook, but the free RAM slot does offer some expansion possible.

Battery Life

Currently only the 3-cell battery version of the MSI Wind is shipping, and I would barely call the Wind travel friendly because of it. At lowest screen brightness and the processor locked in ECO mode, the Wind almost broke 3 hours with wireless enabled but no activity taking place. When you turned the backlight brightness up to reasonable levels which range between 60-70% and leave the processor in the normal mode, battery life plummeted to 2 hours and 6 minutes under "normal" conditions. This includes heavy web browsing, installing a small application, and viewing images off of a memory card. For something a business user might want to take with him or her on the road, this is unacceptable, even compared with gaming notebooks.

When the 6-cell battery starts shipping as a standard item, my harsh opinion would change as you might be able to break 4-5 hours depending on usage since the battery is twice the size. This is basically the only option for road warriors, besides packing an AC adapter and extension cord at all times to gain outlet access.

Conclusion

The MSI Wind is one of the best subnotebooks I have seen come out of the mini notebook storm that has hit us the past few months. It offers a 10" widescreen, 2.5" SATA hard drive, Intel Atom processor, and WIFI with Bluetooth for well under what some of the other mainstream competition charge. All all of this seems to come with a small caveat right now: horrible battery life. MSI is only selling the 3-cell version of the Wind, which averages just a hair over 2 hours of mobile use. This is unacceptable for a travel companion device. Good news is sometime in the future a configuration will be sold with the extended battery, and early adopters will need to wait for a 6-cell accessory battery.

For the $500 price you really can't ask for much more beyond the 6-cell battery. The screen is great, the keyboard is great, build quality is top notch, and above all the thing doesn't light your pants on fire ... at least not due to heat.

Pros

• No heat to ignite pants or palms
• Super bright LED backlit screen
• Near perfect keyboard
• Storage device offers an easy route of upgrade

Cons

• Battery life is abysmal with the 3-cell
• Limited supply at release, hard to acquire

 

Looks good , Its a real shame about the battery life.

 

Thanks for doing the outdoorshot. A very clear photo.

 

Thanks for the review. wPrime suggest the 1.6GHz Atom has the performance of the 1.2GHz U1500. It would be interesting to see some other CPU benchmarks.

Could we have some dimensions and the weight?

The photos suggest a fairly thick chassis which gives potential to have a bigger and quieter fan.

John

 

What would be considered a good/great battery life if 3 hrs is bad?

72oo

 

They got 2 hours with some activity. That's pretty bad in my opinion. But it will be fine with the 6 cell.

 

Thanks for the great review, I love this UMPC!

Btw, will there ever be a $399 MSI Wind??? I think I heard it from one of the posts,,,

 

The Linux model was supposed to start at 399, and I think have 512MB RAM onboard instead of 1GB

 

They said that a slimmer version was in development for buisness for next year. but then the fan would have to be smaller?

 

I live in Europe (Poland) and MSI Wind is not that cheap - unfortunately. It cost's 749,50 $ - it is with current exchange rate USD/PLN - 1/2,052. Here is link to shop http://www.komputronik.pl/Netbooki/MSI_WIND_U100_Atom_N270_/_1GB_/_80GB_/_XPH_bialy/pelny,id,57883/ it states on the right 1499 - and 1499 divide by 2,052 ... 749 USD$.

Seriously I dont know why here are that prices ?!

 

Seems too much. Elsewhere in Europe Winds costs about 400 euros / 1300 zloty.

 

I agree but they are not to blame as shortage is due to a fire in the factory so we will just have to wait for the 6 cell to be made available...

 

I wonder when this fad will be over...

 

great review, thanks Kevin, for this work.
one question: you made a hint about eee901: "...After my hands on with the ASUS Eee PC 901 and the Hybrid Engine that allowed you to overclock..."

did I missed the review of 901 or you're talking about near future?

 

I had a early hands on about a month ago with the 901

http://www.notebookreview.com/default.asp?newsID=4447

 

Yeah , Ive heard elsewhere it dosnt void your warranty if you break that sticker (as its the only way to upgrade ram or HDD), its just that any damage you may do when your inside the machine is not coverd.

 

So does anyone know why the turbo feature was removed? Will the WIND ever get the turbo feature back?

 

Very nice, hopefully they'll offer the 6 cell as an extra soon, or even better make it standard for a little extra cost.

 

A shame. Less than 3 hours just doesn't cut it for me. Hope Acer Aspire One is "the one" for me.

 

Looking around I didnt mind much, but some people said there was a fear of burning up the processor or greatly reducing its life.

 

the battery life is dismal. even with my m1530, i get 4-5 hrs using the 9 cell battery. why should i sacrifice so much power and only 3lbs in order to get smaller results? this is a disappointment. hopefully another "netbook" will be able to conserve power better

 

To hide the fact that battery life is poor.
Maybe see turbo if unit comes shipped with larger battery.

 

Chris_ast1, the price in Poland is 150% because somebody has to pay for promised economic miracle ;-)

Ok, seriously now -- great review, thanks Kevin, but one thing in cons list is missing -- lack of DVI/HDMI port.

I don't know what is going with manufacturers nowadays but almost all laptops miss this port -- you have a lot of great 20"-24" monitors with DVI but what is the purpose when I have to plug it in via VGA-DVI converter?
Shame, especially for such small laptop as Wind.

Oh, and with the keyboard, shift keys could not be smaller, come on! But the arrow keys block should be lowered one row -- that way there would be a plenty of room in the shift row, as well as space row and pressing arrow keys would be easier. Example of such layout:
http://www.notebookreview.com/assets/5955.jpg

 

Kevin, if you still have the review model, could you try running 720p video with the CoreAVC codec? I can't find an answer to Atom's performance with this scenario anywhere on the net.

 

I have been trying this, and had no luck. It spikes the processor during video, and would probably want something 30-50% faster to handle the video. It just chokes on the higher bitrate stuff.

 

Damn, guess I'll wait for the next round of UMPCs then. Or get an iPhone. Thanks for the help.

 

For those who are interested, I am working on a Vista piece for the Wind today. Should be up tomorrow

 

I've seen other people having no problem with playing 720p files, probably other codecs.

 

Thanks so much for the review - especially for the video evaluation. I am torn between the MSI and the Dell that is supposed to arrive in August. Glad to hear that the MSI is a good product.

 

I'm specifically talking 720p H.264 mkv files. If you know of any sites showcasing this, links would be very much appreciated.

 

Well one site was a dutch site (GoT), a test by MSI, a 720p wmv from MS HD showcase played well, 30-40% cpu I believe.

The other site, not sure but I think mentioned on www.msi-wind.de, and I am not sure which codec or player they used.

What player did you use? Sometimes VLC player performs better than other because of lower CPU utilization.

 

on another forum, a guy tried 720p h264 mkv with coreavc(best 264 codec there is) and it couldn't play it. massively dropped frames.

 

imo, the right price for this kind of device is $299. I'm gonna wait for the dell. although I half expect them to raise the price for their minimum spec

 

Well I just got confirmed that it plays 720p files from Microsoft and Apple fluently:
http://www.apple.com/trailers/#section=justhd
http://www.microsoft.com/windows/windowsmedia/musicandvideo/hdvideo/contentshowcase.aspx

 

Do you have access to the Wind? If so, could you perhaps try one of the 720p mkvs from places like http://www.animesuki.com/ ?

 

I don't, but people I talk to on the forum do. However, I think this already answers your question:
http://forums.msiwind.net/viewtopic.php?f=11&t=877&view=previous

If not let me know, I can do a request.

 

Hmmm, looks interesting. The Kurenai results are a little unnerving though. And thats just the OP. If possible, could you request either Macross Frontier or Code Geass? They are a good representation of the sort of shows I'd be watching.

EDIT: I just saw in another thread that Macross Frontier plays fine until you have about 4 different sets of subtitles on screen. This is making me feel a lot better. Though I'm still waiting for the Gigabyte M912 before making a decision.

 

I tried multiple 720p sources, including some WMV stuff and a certain prologue that may or may not be related to a certain Bat that was 350mb long and in MKV format. These were both tried with the latest codec packs (CCCP and quicktime alternative) and nothing played without dropping half the frames. The CPU was always pegged. Considering a notebook (C100, 1.8ghz celeron M) could not play this and benchmarked faster, the Atom is in way over its head.

Now it might be specifically encoded stuff, similar to what Apple releases in HD for the Apple TV which has a 1Ghz Core Solo (chokes on normal 720p content).

 

Have you tried VLC player and Mediaplayer classic?

And have you tried the 720p materials from here:
http://www.apple.com/trailers/#section=justhd
http://www.microsoft.com/windows/windowsmedia/musicandvideo/hdvideo/contentshowcase.aspx
According to dutch users they play fine.

 

During the tests I used WMP11 and MPC

Dont have the review unit anymore to run tests on, but from past experience Apple Trailers have been less demanding then true 720p ripped content.

 

i'm wondering if this thing can at least play xvid encoded files of higher quality. i.e., 1.4 GB file with AC3 of a 2 hr video.

You obviously probably shouldn't/wouldn't be using this machine to watch very high quality videos or blu-ray, but I would at least like to know that I can play some of those good quality anime shows!

 

Have you looked at page 4 of this thread? There's quite a lot of info.

 

The reason for the lower performance may be here:
Digging a little deeper, we discovered that the Wind's CPU is constantly toggling between 800MHz and 1.6GHz. While that may help battery life, it did not help the Wind when multitasking.
http://reviews.cnet.com/laptops/msi-wind-u100-035la/4505-3121_7-33154363.html?tag=prod.txt.2

RM Clock could solve this.

 

First impression

Got mine today - MSI Wind U100 with 2GB RAM. Let me first add that I use it as a desktop computer, with mouse, keyboard and monitor atached.

Mechanical:
Looks good, seems solid, nice design, somewhat impressive for this price. Status lamps are placed at the edge of the base for you to see also when the lid is closed - good - especially when used as desk-top computer. Connections are all placed on the sides - good and bad. Good that the USB connectors and 4-in-1 are placed for easy plugin, not at the back fumbling around. Bad for the VGA and power connectors, quite unpractical. They have to rethink the layout of the mainboard. I would like to see 2 USB at the back panel, and 2 at the sides. I would like to see the on-off button outside.

Display:
Impressive, the LED backlight gives a bright picture, aslo in bright daylight. The LED backlight is in my opinion a key issue, sets all non-LED netbooks on the sideline. This realy gives you some thaughts when comparing with the good old LCD monitor. My next LCD monitor will for sure be with LED backlight. + no LCD buzz from a underdimentioned powersupply to feed the energy gready backlight. Actually I will seek a replacement for the 24" Benq soon as possible. The smaller scren, the better display quality you need - the LCD of the Acer C110 has a faded patina compared with this MSI.

Install:
Fast and with no problems. Finally a machine whichs comes relativly clean, instead of the usual bunch of sw packages which you havnt asked for, but is installed even you want it or not. Good !
Uses XP, not Vista - good !! Was plannning to put Windows 2000 prof on, but now I will reconsider this - well dual boot just to check and play, but think it will create more problems than it solves - this is not final though. If you look for more computing power, W2K prof might be the solution, perhaps combined with overclocking.

HDD:
Nice 160GB HDD, very good. There are a lot of discusions regarding SS disks contra traditional HDD. To understand the problematics in a SS, you need to understand the flash technology. Unlike the RAM memory which you can read and write as you like, a byte in the flash chip can only be written once, then you have to erase it by a special embedded routine which takes time. A single byte cant be erased, you must erase a full block of 64Kb at a time. This requires sophisticated driver to manage, there are special flash drivers managing which bytes have been written, which bytes are "dirty", and which are ready for writing. Once in a while the disk gets filled up with bytes which are dirty and needs to be erased, and the driver performs a "garbage collection", moving data around and formatting the sector ( like disk fragmenting ). If the SS disk is full or above 60% this gets a quite timeconsuming task, since you have less and less space to work in, garbage collection is happening more and more frequent, till when its 90% full, you cant write on the disk without performing a garbagecollection. With this knowledege, its easy to conclude, that the good old HDD is supirior to the SS. SS is used for storing data, not ment to be a working disk. Soon - well they said that for years now - we will se a new type of high capacity FRAM which has the ability to remember the data when power is removed, but acts like a RAM.

Optical drive:
Do we need optical drives in the year 2009 - the world is going SS and vinyl, CD and DVD is the past, old technology. All programs are now baught and downloaded from the net, when did you last time buy a program on a physical media ? XP is on the HDD for system recovery, no need for a install CD/DVD here. My standard programs, like Partition Magic, W2K Prof etc, are all on USB keys. USB keys is today a cheap media, you get them every where as gifts, part of the package, second hand ... Backup I make on a 500GB USB HDD ( well the paranoied count of two HDD backups ). No fooling around finding a CD/DVD ( down to the shop ). Even it has LAN connection this seems to be slower and more compliated than just turn on the external HDD box using the USB connection.

Heat and noise:
Heat no problem, no need of heat guns and other temperature measuring equipment - just put your hand on, it runs quite cool -less than hand temperature. As I normally run it with the NetBook closed, the inside/keyboard temperature is higher than normal, a bit above hand temperature.
Fan noise. Its on all the time and you hear it. I baught this MSI as the reviews said its very quiet - not for me. Comparing with the Acer C110 from 2003 which is grave silent, no fan, its a dissapointment that they in the year of 2009 still cant make silent portables. I can live with it - move it away from the desk - but for those who use it as a netbook, this might be an issue - even its better than other netbooks in terms of noise, dosnt mean it makes it a good one in terms of noise. Either you hear the fan or not. You could say that this disadvantage gives an advantage in reliability and product life. The static on fan lowers the overall temperature in the unit, the higher you stress a electronical device temperature whise, the shorther product life. Called the bathtop curve.

Performence:
I have today a Acer 5920G T7300, 1GB Turbo Memory, 2GB RAM, Vista. The MSI is much faster when Vista is involved, opening folders, starting programs etc, but crunching data the T7300 is about 2-4 times faster. We have an "old" Intel Pentium 4 2GHz XP station here with a gaming card, the MSI is running faster in any aspect. My daughter of 10, a gaming expert, who is used to run her games on the Pentium 4 concluded that everything was faster - the "Mine" game in Club Penguin ( fast running train ) was running smooth, faster than the Pentium 4 with gaming card.

Smooth - reading all the reviews, "we actually managed to run xxxxx", pheeew, they go step by step through applications they test, and you hold your breath - smooth or not .... ohh my g.. what a scary movie story ... --- its fast, its a 2008/09 x86 Intel processor running at 1.6Ghz with a 950 and XP, dont worry.

I ran simontaniously 5 heavy applications of 300MB each, no problem - the Acer aspire 5920G can only run 2-3.

Conclusion on performance: Unless you are a professional running data chrunching applications, or you run some graphics intensive very fast moving games ( well, thats what they say in the reviews, I havnt experinced any thing unusual in graphics performance ), the Atom 1.6 Ghz is more than adecuate ! The MSI Wind U100 is a full featured computer, in a small format.


Usage:
So what do you use a NetBook like the U100 for ?
a) As a NetBook, as such its among the best, if not the best.
b) As a desk top computer. There are many advantages using a NetBook like the U100 as a desk top computer, you can carry your desk top computer with you on vacations etc, but probably not very operational for every day disconnect/connect - but what the hech - buy two. Space saving. Connect an external keyboard, mouse and monitor, and you have an energy saving, low noise, battery backuped, dorm-mode-enabled computer.


Statements:
1) And please dont put a dual Atom in - work to improve the cooling design and get rid of the silly fan once and for all !

2) How about a "BlackBook", without display and keyboard, but with batteries, .. a desktop with battery backup, dorm mode etc - would be nice !

 

Excellent review I just purchased one of this I am so happy with it feels much faster than my old netbook

 

I dont know if you guys have already seen it but the new MSI Wind U115 Hybrid looks really promising. 17 hours of battery life!! I have to hand it to MSI for coming up with machines such as this one. Check it out here:

http://www.techpinas.com/2009/05/msi-wind-u115-hybrid-out-demo-video-in.html

What do you think?

 

Wow 17 hours....the battery life just gets longer and longer....

 

I think folks are having different experiences with the Wind in this regard. I had one (U100-641US) and had no fan noise at all. The think never heated up. I like the unit, but ended up returning in to Coscto (wanted something a tad bit bigger on the screen size). The MSI Wind forums seem to have varying noise results from users as well.

 

For those who wants to know how to fix MSI Wind U100, I can give you the tips.

I just fixed mine and now running really quiet. It wasn't difficult. Just open the lower bottom casing of your laptop, unscrew then fan cover (steel plate), unattached the fan and the power cable fan from the motherboard. Push up the fan part from the fan base. You will see the ball bearing inside. Now put some grease to the bearing and push back the fan part to the fan base. You can buy the grease from walmart in the auto dept.