When the Asus Eee PC was first unleashed into the world last year, people fell in love with the form factor. They liked the idea of having a notebook PC that was so much smaller than even the most compact of laptops at the time. Sure, you could have invested in a powerful smartphone or some form of UMPC, but none of these offered the familiar experience of a regular notebook. The Eee PC, with its seven-inch display and rather anemic spec sheet, was a bargain machine and it was supposed to supplement your main computer.
At COMPUTEX Taipei 2008, we got flooded with a wide assortment of Eee PC competitors. The two things that most of these units had in common was the fact that they had displays larger than seven-inches and most were powered by the new Intel Atom processor. On paper, one of the most appealing offerings was the MSI Wind. Although it has gone through its fair share of delays, the MSI Wind is now available for mass market consumption and we had the chance to take a review unit out for an extended test drive.
Features and Specifications
The MSI Wind comes with an impressive laundry list of features for such a tiny machine. They include:
- 1.6GHz Intel Atom processor
- 80GB 2.5″ SATA hard drive
- 1GB 667MHz DDR2 RAM
- 80% full-size keyboard
- 10-inch WSVGA display
- Three USB 2.0 ports
- VGA video output
- Integrated 802.11b/g Wi-Fi and Bluetooth 2.0
- Built-in multi-card reader
- Windows XP Home Edition
- Webcam and mic
- Three-cell 2200mAh battery
If it wasn’t for the smaller form factor and the Atom processor, you’d swear that the the MSI Wind was a “real” laptop. All your connectivity needs are covered, with the exception of 3G cellular data.
What’s in The Box?
Inside the box, you get the MSI Wind itself, along with a Quick Start guide, installation CDs, and the power adapter and cable. The review version came with a padded protective case, though I’m not sure if the retail version would include this. It was also the wrong color as the case was white and our review unit was black. The case is similar to the Zero-Shock style cases that you may find with other notebooks.
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First Impressions and Feature Highlights
One of the first things that you’ll notice about the MSI Wind is its relative size. Unlike the original Asus Eee PC, the MSI Wind has a substantially larger keyboard. It’s about 80% the size of a full-size keyboard, so typing on the Wind is a lot easier. I always struggled with the tiny keyboard on the original Eee. The keys were just too small and squished together. Aside from the keyboard, you’ll also notice that the display is a fair size bigger. It’s a ten-inch display with a 1024×600 pixel resolution. This is just enough to render most websites, though you will find that the certain program windows don’t quite fit on the vertical axis.
Regarding the rest of the specifications, you get a 1.6GHz Intel Atom processor, 80GB hard drive, 1GB of RAM, integrated Wi-Fi, integrated Bluetooth, built-in webcam, stereo speakers, and integrated graphics. Along the right side, shown below, you get a single USB port, multi-card reader, headphone and microphone jacks, VGA output, and an Ethernet port.
Along the left side, shown below, you get two USB ports and the port for the power adapter. There are no jacks along the back or the front.
Weighing in at about two or three pounds, including the battery, the MSI Wind is substantially lighter than most larger laptops. This makes it great for portability. It’s also nice that they included a protective case for the subnotebook, though I’m not sure if this is included in the retail package.
Web Surfing and Productivity
Let’s get one thing perfectly clear. The MSI Wind will never be able to replace your regular desktop or laptop computer, nor is it designed to do so. The Wind is a supplementary machine that you can take along during travel or short jaunts around the city. In this way, you probably shouldn’t expect to use the Wind for picture and video editing, intense gaming, or any other processor-intensive task. By and large, you’ll be using it for web surfing, word processing, and other basic tasks.
So, how does it perform? In my terribly unscientific tests, I found that the MSI Wind was a fair bit faster than a smartphone, but it is nowhere close in performance to even a budget notebook. Surfing through the Internet one webpage at a time isn’t horrible, but you may experience some delays depending on the content. If there are a lot of Java applets, advertising, and other things, the load and delay may get a little annoying. I also experience a fair bit of lag when I had more than a couple tabs open in Internet Explorer. I suspect that this is because of a lack of RAM rather than a lack of processing power.
I don’t know about you, but it’s not out of the ordinary for me to have up to ten (or more) tabs open at a time on a regular basis. In this way, I had to dial down my sensory overload when surfing on the MSI Wind. Do it one page at a time with a touch of patience and you’ll be fine. Thankfully, the robustness of the Wi-Fi radio was able to hold up most of the time. I didn’t experience any unexpected cutouts.
On a side note, the MSI Wind was able to maintain a steady connection when I was streaming audio and video through Ustream.tv. It wasn’t any more choppy using the integrated webcam and mic than it would be on my day-to-day laptop, a Dell Inspiron 640m.
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PC Mark and HD Tune Benchmarks
I ran the MSI Wind through PC Mark 05 to come up with the benchmarks above. It was not able to come up with a composite PCMark score, and this is because it was not able to complete the tests for the GPU. It did come up with results for the processor (1489), memory (2393), and hard drive (3922), however. It’s no speed demon, that’s for sure, and the fail on the GPU means no 3D gaming on the MSI Wind. These benchmark scores place the MSI Wind right in between a UMPC and a full notebook, which makes sense. When I ran the same PCMark tests on my Dell 640m (Core 2 Duo T5300, 2GB RAM, 945GM graphics), I got 4340 on the processor, 3275 on memory, 3354 on hard drive.
Most UMPCs and smaller notebooks make use of a 1.8-inch hard drive, so the MSI Wind is able to offer a little better performance by way of its 2.5-inch drive. It doesn’t have the efficiency of a solid state drive, but you do get a full 80 gigs of storage capacity. For now, that’s not going to happen with a budget-minded SSD-equipped subnotebook.
Performance with the included 2.5-inch Western Digital 80GB hard drive was not consistent across the drive, as you can tell from the HD Tune test shown above. This isn’t a huge deal, but it means that you will be getting anywhere between 50MB/sec and 25MB/sec. That said, this is still better than what most 1.8-inch drives would be able to achieve. Many smaller laptops and UMPCs make use of a 1.8-inch drive, as you know.
Overall, the HD Tune benchmark for the Wind’s WD drive is about the same as what the Samsung 2.5-inch 80GB hard drive in my Dell 640m. Transfer rates varied between 25MB/sec and 50MB/sec, with burst rate of 77.9MB/sec and an access time of 20.4ms.
Battery Life
Like many of the other notebooks in MSI’s collection, the Wind also comes with a feature where you can dial up and dial down the performance as you see fit. There are two distinct modes that can be activated by holding down the Function button and hitting F10.
There is one mode that is designed to conserve battery life, presumably underclocking the processor to get you a few more minutes of juice. The other mode dials up the performance so that you can actually surf more than one website at a time. In the real world, the difference between the two modes was negligible, making me think that it was more of a marketing ploy than anything else.
For all intents and purposes, I was able to get between 2:00 and 2:30 of battery life under normal use. The screen brightness was set at about 50%, the Wi-Fi was on, Bluetooth was off, and I was doing some mild web surfing. Your mileage will vary based on your use, but this is what I got out of the 3-cell battery. If you’re willing to fork out an extra $80 or so, MSI will outfit your Wind with a 6-cell battery instead.
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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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