MSI Wind U100: First impressions
For the past three years I’ve been carrying around a Dell X1 laptop (originally designed by Samsung as the Q30). In the past months it’s begun to show signs of old age, the batteries no longer hold much charge, I’ve maxed the HDD and don’t want to offload more data, the screen is fading, and there’s a large divot in the trackpad’s left mouse button where my thumbnail hits. hehehe.
It was time to get a new laptop and I decided to find out why people are making so much noise about netbooks. After poking around a few reviews, I narrowed down my candidates to the 10″ Asus eeePC, the MSI Wind U100, and the Acer Aspire One. I finally ended with the MSI Wind based on its 160gb hard drive, the possibility to buy a 9 cell battery which will last 6+ hours, claims of solid build and a respectable keyboard, and supposedly little heat and little noise. The major downside of the Wind is that it only ships with Windoze, so yet again I was stuck paying MS tax.
The laptop arrived in the mail this week, and my first impression is that the reviews were generally spot on, except when it comes to noise. The MSI Wind has a fan and a 2.5 inch spinning-hunk-o-metal hard drive inside, both of which can make a raucus if you’re sitting in a seminar room. To put this in perspective, I’ve been using a Dell X1 for the past three years which has NO fan and uses a nearly silent 1.8″ hard drive. Of course the problem with the X1′s lack of a fan is that it can get quite toasty even when doing basic computing like web browsing. Why oh why did Transmeta have to die?
