MSI Wind U100 – real-life impressions

After having unboxed my MSI Wind about a month ago, the device immediately became my “third hand”. It followed me on a vacation, on business meetings and to various other places – the image below shows the little critter standing in a OEBB first class train compartment (this time manned by friendlier employees):

First of all: the MSI Wind gives you a completely new degree of versatility. Ganged up with a Nokia N71 for high-speed internet on the go, the mobility afforded by this combination was almost unheard-of before. The light weight of the machine allows you to take it to places where a 13 or 15″ device has to stay at home…casually carrying it along is a non-issue here.

The CPU power of the Atom CPU has proven to be ample for my usage (FlashBlock is a must, though). Of course, a desktop is a lot faster: even though you sometimes have to wait a bit longer, I personally think that this is a great tradeoff for the high mobility. Think of it this way: do you wish to work or not.

Looking at the touchpad: my Wind was one of the first batch which still had the Synaptics touchpad. I personally love the touch scroll feature – my girlfriend absolutely hates the touchpad. As MSI has started to phase this touchpad out, this becomes a non-issue for touch scroll haters (which seem to be the majority)…

The Achilles heel of the U100 is its battery. Even though the three-cell battery gives me a good 2.5-3h of service (disable the LAN port in Control Panel), the Wind nevertheless is out of power more than my old Acer laptop (75min power) was. The reason for this is the dreadfully slow charge rate: when powered on, the Wind recovers about 33% per hour.

Cutting a long story short: I absolutely love this machine, and consider it the best 400 Euros ever spent. The degree of mobility given is insane – I have updated my news services (and worked on my programs) in literally thousands of places in the last months. If you don’t have one, get one asap – you will not regret it!

Related posts:

1. MSI Wind – Synaptics Touchpad mod
2. MSI Wind U120 has 3G, SSD option – faster CPU possible
3. The MSI Wind U100 review – MSI Wind U100 unboxing
4. MSI Wind: 9-cell battery gives 7h+ per charge
5. MSI Wind U100 overclocking BIOS released