Final Thoughts and Conclusion

On paper, the MSI Wind should be able to blow the Asus Eee PC out of the water, but as always, a hands on evaluation will put this question to rest. It’s got a real hard drive, giving you a solid 80GB of storage capacity. Since this is a regular SATA laptop hard drive, there is the potential to break in and increase storage size to any available drive on the market or spring for a solid start drive when prices return from the stratosphere. Yes, this may not be as efficient or “cool” as a solid state drive out of the box, but you do get a lot more space for storing your stuff. The Intel Atom processor is reasonably solid and I enjoyed being able to type on a nearly full-size keyboard and surfing the web at a decent resolution.

Speaking of resolution, the quality of the 1024×600 pixel display was very decent for a unit at this price point. Viewing angles were decent and MSI resisted the urge to go shiny, opting for a matte finish. This is a blessing if you’ve ever tried to use a shiny screen in bright light or outdoors. On the downside, colors seem to be a bit on the dull side, but that’s the price you pay for a non-glare screen.

 

 

However, there are a few caveats that I have to mention. Battery life on the 3-cell unit is far from phenomenal and surfing more than one website at a time can be quite the exercise in patience. I also noticed that the Wind got warm very quickly, so you may want to invest in an inexpensive cooling solution for extended use. The price is also not as appealing anymore, as the base unit is already $499. Toss in a 6-cell battery and you’re looking at $549, not to mention that some retailers like to mark up the price even further due to the scarcity of these machines as of late.

The MSI Wind U100 is no Eee PC killer, per se, but it competes very well with its Taiwanese brethren. We hope to have a test unit of the new Eee PC’s shortly to see how they compare in the real world. For now, the MSI Wind is a strong competitor and gets a recommendation for being a fairly solid piece of equipment.

Pros

• Feature set is very impressive on paper
• Large keyboard and 10-inch display
• Real 80GB hard drive for decent storage
• Three times as many USB ports as MacBook Air
• Looks great, good build quality too

Cons

• Performance isn’t fantastic; struggles with multi-tab web browsing
• Gets hot really easily, really quickly
• Where’s the more budget-minded model?
• Battery life is disappointing

Overall Rating: 8.5 / 10.0

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