MaximumPC 2008 12

Netbooks

66 | MAXIMUMPC | DEC 08 | http://www.maximumpc.com

MSI has been moving into the notebook mar-

ket in a big way over the past few years, with

forays into business and gaming notebooks,

and, this summer, netbooks, with the Wind

U100. We have to say, we’re impressed.

The MSI Wind runs on the same Intel

Atom N270 processor and Intel GMA950

integrated graphics chipset as the other

two netbooks in our roundup. Unlike those

two, however, the Wind sports a 10.1-inch

LED-backlit LCD display, making it the

largest netbook we’ve tested, although

that’s nearly an oxymoron.

The corner hinges on the Wind are not

quite as sturdy as the Eee PC’s barrel hinge or

the Aspire One’s, but it’s still solid. The matte

screen is quite bright under AC power and

readable at even 25 percent backlighting.

The Wind performed admirably in our

tests (with the exception of Quake Live),

lasting nearly two hours in our video

battery-rundown test. It plowed through

our Photoshop benchmark in 730 seconds,

twice as fast as the Eee 901—albeit a good

third the speed of our Asus C90S zero-point

notebook.

The Wind’s larger size serves it well:

Though it has the same-size keyboard as

Acer’s Aspire One (reviewed next), its

wider body means that large hands

don’t hang quite as far off the

board.

Add to that the slightly larger

screen, and the Wind emerges as the easi-

est to use netbook in our roundup. Sure, we

like the Eee’s fantastic battery life, and the

Acer’s bigger hard drive, but drop another

$50 on a six-cell battery and you’ve got

five hours of battery life and a form factor

that’s comfortable enough to use for those

five hours.

We love nearly everything about this machine,

except its price.

VERDICT

$500, http://www.msimobile.com^7

MSI WIND U100

MSI Wind U100

The bigger they are, the... more

comfortable they are to type on

DISPLAY 10.1” LCD @1024x600

PROCESSOR Intel Atom N270 1.6GHz, Socket

437

RAM 1GB DDR2/533

STORAGE 80GB HDD

PORTS 3 USB, VGA-out, audio in/out,

SD reader

WIRELESS Bluetooth, 802.11b/g

LAP/CARRY WEIGHT 2lbs, 9oz/3lbs, 4oz

SPECIFICATIONS

730

YES

WNR

1:57

PHOTOSHOP (SEC)

H.264

QUAKE LIVE

BATTERY LIFE (HRS:MIN)

BENCHMARKS

All the netbooks we tested run Windows XP, but they all

have siblings that run Linux. The first netbooks shipped

with Linux only, but as the category grew in popularity,

so too did demand for a more familiar operating system.

Vista is too resource-intensive (although some netbooks,

like the MSI Wind, offer it as an option), but XP is stable

and was built to run on this caliber of hardware.

But is XP the best operating system for a netbook?

Most common netbook tasks—browsing, document

editing, playing media, even using VoIP—aren’t

Windows-exclusive. There are Linux apps that do all

of these things, and netbook manufacturers include

them with the customized Linux distros loaded onto

their machines. We rely on Windows to run certain

applications that don’t necessarily have Linux

equivalents: games, media-creation software like Adobe

Creative Suite 3, and so forth. But will you really be using

these types of apps on a netbook?

Netbook manufacturers have taken pains to make

using Linux more intuitive—Acer and Asus have custom

Linux front-ends with easy access to OpenOffice, Firefox,

the Evolution mail client, Pidgin, and telephony and

media-player applications.

We can’t think of anything we use a netbook for that

we couldn’t do with Linux. And if it shaves 50 or 100

bucks off the price of the machine, why not go with the

open-source OS? It might just be your first step into the

larger world of Linux.

OS ALTERNATIVE

Is Windows Necessary?