MSI Wind U100 review!

Specs of model I received:
802.11 b/g
bluetooth
10/100 Ethernet
vga port
6-cell battery
80gb hard drive
10" screen
1gb of ram (upgradeable to 2)
the rest of the usual suspects.

My usual computer habits:
I am what i would consider a media mogul, i have many movies saved to my main desktop in 1080p and 720p, along with a respectable 27gb of high bitrate music.

What i expected from this computer:
I expected a long battery life (around 5 hours), be able to listen to music type in word and brows the wed all at the same time. and watch the occasional dvd quality video on the computer.

What I actually experienced:

Battery:
The battery is just as good as i expected i get around 5 hours when i am browsing the web and doing not much else. (i have only had this for a few days so extensive battery tests have not been performed). The system even has a mode called ECO mode which changes the processor down to 1.3 and dims the screen in order to prolong battery life, i am unable to say by how much at this point though.

screen:
A very beautiful detailed screen coming in at 1024x600 so it can display the web in full size and you almost never need to scroll sideways. The screen can become very bright when needed. I have not found it to be painful on the eyes over extended periods. the colours are what you would expect from an lcd, the blacks are black enough and the whites are pure, (on lower backlighting they become a bit more grey but that is to be expected.)

I attached a second monitor which it handled displaying a movie on with no problems.

Keyboard:
Ahh the keyboard, this i can say is one of the selling points of this netbook when compared to the smaller 8.9" netbooks. the keyboard i can say is about 90% the size of a keyboard on a 14" laptop. It does take some getting used to, as i type this I am making a few more mistakes than normal. The arrow keys are really small so if you want to play some CS on this using them you might want to switch to AWSD. but over all i have few complaints about the keyboard on this computer.

as a bit of a note it has no home or end keys. i never used them anyway so i don't care.

touchpad:
my biggest complaint on this computer and every laptop is the touchpad. on this one i find it wayy to sensitive as in a can almost just hover my finger on it and it will click. it is too small for my liking and i find the keys a little hard to click sometimes. i would have preferred they made the left click and right click two different buttons instead of one button that is both but you just click one side or the other. but i hate every touchpad to some degree so take my hatred with that in mind.

Features:
not too many on this unit but they are not really needed, blutooth is nice, i would have liked wireless n but the one i got did not have it. (it is available though). it has quite the array of function keys, my one complaint here is the key to turn on wireless and blutooth is the same one. so if i decide i want wireless of but blutooth on i need to cycle through the modes to get to that i cant just turn one or the other on with seperate buttons. the ECO mode is nice as explained it dims the screen and lowers the processor to 1.3ghz so it should last longer.

preinstalled OS:
I ordered mine with XP so i got the well known windows operating system and i expected the usual bloatware when i recieved my computer but to my plesent suprise i found that it had almost none! sure it had all the odd hardware driver managers but they are not bloat ware i guess...

It had an installer for norton antivirus but i had no need for norton so i deleted it. of course it had office trial installed but again i did not need it so i deleted it.

Overall style
this is really up to you but i thinkmy black wind u100 is a really slick netbook and i would not change anything on it. the lid of the computer is a shiny piano black finnish, and the rest of the netbook is a black plastic which as far as i can tell does not scuff to easily. the oddest thing to me is the led on the power button is in the shape of a star.

the hinges apear to be strong plastic which can withstand some beating and the screen is thick enough to withstand some pressure. but if you push hard enough on it you can see visual distortions.


speed
the boot time is respectable, coming in quite quick around 30 seconds is my best guess. the system even when running in ECO mode (as it is right now as i write this) is quite snappy to my commands. i am currently sitting at about 550mb or ram being used, this is with firefox, mIRC, utorrent, and bitdefender running. for a little atom processor i have no complaints. (its actually faster than my moms desktop)

media playback
this is no gaming machine and i hope no one actually thinks that it is. i can easily play music and brows the web and write in office. movies the much harder medium and what i was hoping that it can play decently. well to my surprise it handled video really well. i can get up to 720p video to play. 1080p might be a possibility if i were to tweak the settings more but as a default setup i can easily play .avi and i can watch 720p if i am doing nothing else. so for a little machine i was pleasantly surprised when it did this much.

tldr;

PROS:
Lightweight
fast
long bettery life
ECO mode
keyboard
screen


cons:
touchpad
arrow keys
star shaped power button led


would i recommend to a friend?
totally, it is a overall good peice of equipment and i would not change for any other netbook.

 

Nice review on the MSI Wind...

You should post some pictures, if you can..sometime!



Cin

 

The processor should auto clock down to 800mhz due to EIST anyways. I think the upper limit is placed at 1.3GHz. Does it lower the slower speed to half that, at 650mhz?

You mean dedicated home/end keys. You need to hit FN + the arrow key to get the additional functionality.
It might be just me but they swapped the FN and CTRL key on the left side. I think Lenovo uses this scheme as well but it's not very common with other manufacturers. I made many miscues trying to do CTRL key shortcuts.
My other main gripe with the keyboard is the smaller-than-normal comma and period keys. Many mistakes made when touch-typing.

.

This is the worst touchpad I have ever used. There's maybe 2 additional features added by bothering to install the sentelic software. The scroll features (if you want to call it that) are inconsistent at best. They did the biggest mistake by not maintaining a Synaptics touchpad, which is worlds above this. The buttons are not great but they are livable and they do get better over time.

Odd that you didn't mention that on A/C, instead of going into ECO mode, it will overclock the processor to whatever you set it to in the BIOS, up to 24%
This is with the latest bios (v1.09 at the time I used the MSI).

I found the hinges to be a big problem. The LCD would flap when i touch-typed. I went through 3 of these, tried them in-store, and they all did the same thing. Less flap on a solid surface but when used on my lap, it would make me almost sick.

The Atom is a surprising little processor. People complain about it but they always seem to compare to a processor that draws more than 10x the power. You would expect something that draws 10x the power to perform well in comparison. It wasn't meant to be a replacement for C2D yet it always seems to be compared to it.

Have you tried any other netbook(s)?

 

thx for responses, i will post pics as soon as i find a camera...

as to the processor for the ECO mode that is just what i have read from other areas, i havent actually testing that myself, but i did make a mistake it is clocked down to 800mhz. not 1.3ghz. where normal mode will dynamically switch between 800 and 1.6 depending on load.

and yes the home and end keys are on the arrow keys I hadn't really noticed at the time, the smaller comma key can be annoying but i got used to it after about 2 days.

actually i had planned on saying this but i forgot while i was writing... as to overclocking I can't say asi have yet to fool around in the BIOS.

for me to get the hinges to have the screen move i need to swing the computer decently hard... i would have to be typing with the force of a hammer to get it to move.

as to my use of other netbooks yes i have had the fortune to use a few others, some for short periods of time and some for weeks... i thought it was a little irrelevant to talk about them on this review though.

but my thoughts are as follows, i have yet to really enjoy any 8.9" screen netbook, i just find they keyboard too small. there are a few others i would like to try the #1 on my list being the dell mini 9 running ubuntu.

 

Cool! Can't wait to see them!

Oh, I have the Mini 9 w/XP...and it's an awesome netbook to me!

Review to come soon!


Cin

 

Great review! Needs some pics but overall great its great to know that you are enjoying it, congrats