First Reviews of the MSI Wind Ultra-Portable Laptop

Ken E. writes "UK tech website Mobile Computer has an early hands-on review of the MSI Wind — a £329 ultraportable notebook that will compete head-on with the Asus Eee PC 900. In its favour are a 10in screen, better keyboard and, perhaps most important of all, an Intel Atom 1.6GHz dual-core processor (though the site shies away from mentioning this open secret due to what sound like NDA constraints). They like it a lot — is this finally a worthy Eee PC alternative?" (£329 is about $650US at the moment.) An anonymous reader points to CNET's hands-on photo gallery of the Wind; CNET's reviewer says the MSI Wind is the first mini notebook with an overclock button. Barence adds another review at PC Pro.

Re:OLPC

[Brian Gordon]

Uh it said a worthy alternative to the eee pc, not the OLPC..

Re:page

[TheRaven64]

I like the placement of the buttons on my MacBook Pro. My ThinkPad has separate buttons, but they are up in the top right corner of the keyboard and hard to hit. My MBP has them on the arrow keys and so switching between scrolling one line and scrolling one page with the keys is just a matter of resting the edge of my left hand on the function key in the bottom-left corner of the keyboard. There is no comment in TFA on whether the 'responsive' trackpad is multitouch - I have got so used to two-fingered 2D scrolling on my MBP's trackpad that I really miss it when I use other machines. They also seem to be following the trend of only including VGA, not DVI, on the machine. For those of us who have gone laptop-only but like having big screens on our desks this is a big drawback, since it basically means you can't use something like this as a primary machine (which I probably could with some external storage for when I'm not mobile) since it can't drive a decent flat panel. TFTs are digital devices, and having a DAC in the laptop and an ADC in the display is just silly (and introduces visible distortions in most cases I've seen).

Re:Motherboard

[Smidge204]

I had one MSI mainboard that was DOA. No problems getting a replacement. Since then it's been used in a small office file server which runs 24/7 in a (sadly) unventilated closet, survived a number of power outages and even a power supply explosion (literally). Running for three years now ann not a single problem... with the mainboard anyway :)

MSI is certainly not a top brand but they're not complete junk either, in my experience.
=Smidge=

And that $ change is mostly due to the $ tanking

[Anonymous Coward]

while the products are produced outside the US, so the exchange rate matters...

Re:Reading in dollars?

[JustinOpinion]

This article [pcworld.com] lists the US prices as:
Linux version: $560
WinXP version: $604

and the UK prices as:
Linux version: £320 (~630 USD)
WinXP version: £350 (~690 USD)

Re:page

[TheRaven64]

I don't know about the EeeeeeeeeeeeeeePC, but with a MacBook [Pro] you can select large chunks of text if you start the drag with one finger on the pad then put the second finger down and scroll.

Re:Back in my day...

[mr_mischief]

It was more of an "underclock" button. "Turbo" was whatever your system should normally run at. Turning it off made it clock down to AT speed so games with timing loops written to CPU NOOPs instead of using the system clock wouldn't be over before you got a chance to play.

$400 in the US

[assassinator42]

The Linux version of the Wind will be only $400 in the US [laptopmag.com]. Unfortunately, it only includes a three-cell battery, which is a deal breaker for me. I'd pay $50 more for a longer battery life, but apparently that will only be available on the "standard" $550 Windows XP model.

Re:Reading in dollars?

[thebdj]

Or it could be $399 [engadget.com]

Re:Reading in dollars?

[Anonymous Coward]

It's already been reported [engadget.com] that the US price for the Linux (SuSE) version will be $399 and the XP version will be $549. The XP version will supposedly include more RAM, Bluetooth, and a higher capacity battery. There's also mention of a $499 "base" XP version.

Also, I believe that "new kit is always significantly more expensive than the USD/GBP exchange rate would imply." Last time I checked, the exchange rate wasn't capable of rational thought (ha!), and thus can't infer.

Re:Anonymous Coward

[the brown guy]

RTFA, it's a 1.6 intel Atom dual core processor. For Shiva's sake it is in the summary, nvm TFA.

Re:Awesome battery life, assuming it meets up to s

[mollymoo]

The Silverthorne Atom was single core, the Diamondville comes in single or dual core.

Re:Antique analog VGA

[Yvan256]

I'm with you on the VGA output. DVI, however, is a bit too big to consider on a laptop, so IMHO they should switch to HDMI instead (which is probably where computer monitors are headed anyway).

As for the enter/backspace key, I hate those huge L-shaped enter keys and a regular-sized backspace key is a problem. In fact, on my Apple keyboard right here, the delete key is just a tad shorter than the return key.

If you rarely use backspace, more power to you. But for the rest of us, a regular-sized backspace key would be too much trouble. In fact, I'd even say that if you can't hit a non-L-shaped enter key, you're the one with a problem.