MSI Wind Notebook
“I’ve given into Engadget’s hype on these machines. Now that I have a capable desktop I’m thinking about slimming down my laptop.
My D810 is more than capable for today’s tasks even with it’s old 1.73 GHz Pentium M. It’s served me well for 3 years. At the time I bought it, it was more of a desktop replacement, but now I’m mostly using my laptop for only web browsing and I want something lighter and more portable.
The wind is portable, stylish, and even cute. I could see elementary girls really digging the pink version. It’s got Intel’s Atom processor clocked at 1.6 GHz. The Atom was designed for low power consumption while providing the x86 instruction set. These processors really got hyped, again by engadget. I think everyone was expecting Intel to do what they did with the Pentium M again, lower power consumption while maintaining current-gen performance. Intel got the the power thing down, but the performance is quite a bit slower. Clock-for-clock the Atom is about half as fast as a Pentium M. So the wind should be like using my current laptop in power-save mode (where is clocks down to 800 MHz) which isn’t bad for surfing the internet.
Other than the processor and the GPU, the wind actually has more features than my D810. It’s got bluetooth, 4-in-1 card reader, 80 GB HDD, built-in mic and webcam, and a turbo button (overclocks the processor to 1.9 GHz when plugged in). My D810 has a smart card reader I’ve never used. Damn business computers.
I can’t wait to get one of these. I just have to find a way to turn my D810 into green.”
That’s what I wrote about 2 months ago. Being 2 months wiser now, I’ve seen how much of a debacle the launch was. Right off the bat, there were 3 delays which added up to a month. Because of a fire at LG’s battery factory, the system only shipped with 3-cell batteries instead of 6-cells. The price went up by $20 for the 3-cell Winds and the 6-cell, which came after another month of delay, cost $50 more than the original price. The final nail in the coffin was that they switched from the Synaptic touchpad to the cheaper Sentelic which doesn’t have “slide your finger to scroll” functionality. I guess I’ll have to wait for another product. The common motif with these netbooks is over promising and under delivering. Just search “netbook” on engadget and you’ll see what I mean.
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