MSI Wind U120-001US 10-Inch Gray Netbook - 6 Cell Battery Review

Average Reviews:

(More customer reviews)I bought this for a friend and have been setting up software and updates for them over the past couple of days. I think the styling of the HP Mini is much nicer than the MSI Winds, but I'm getting battery life of 4 hours and change on this for a much better price. I think most folks can put up with that.
The gray, angular design really evokes some of HPs designs from about 3 years ago, like if an HP business notebook and the MSI Wind U100 had a baby together. Or if an MSI Wind had a baby with another MSI Wind, but it turned out the biological father was really an HP business notebook. Anyhow, this goes to say that while this isn't a Vivienne Tam fashion statement, it doesn't come across looking like a toy either, as some of the other netbooks do. It feels solid, even without crazy aluminum unibody casing or something like that.
I will say that there are a few quirks in the unboxing process that caught me by surprise. One is the the boot-up/install time. You turn the thing on, and it sits there for 15+ minutes installing Windows, I guess, onto a 30 GB partition of the hard drive. The other partition is ~100 GB, and labelled D:, but this is non-obvious to novice users who might wonder where the heck the rest of their drive space went.
The other unboxing/first-time use thing is that the WiFi and camera have to be turned on with a combination of the Fn key and the top row of F-keys. I'm sure this was in the paper insert somewhere in the box, but it wasn't obvious to me, and it would've been nicer to just have a big fat button with a lighted symbol of what it was supposed to turn on, e.g. a webcam or a wireless/radio symbol. By the way, the webcam image is nothing to write home about, but it does ok for Skype etc. WiFi range is pretty good, though -- it almost outslugs the access points I can see from my Macbook. Not sure if that's good, actually, but it sure ain't bad.
1GB of RAM seems to do just fine for this XP-based machine; it can feel a little sluggish if you decide to open three different browsers, Microsoft Office, and some video applications at the same time, but if you're doing that in the first place -- on a netbook -- then maybe you need a prescription for Ritalin. Maybe this is a function of the processor also, I'm not sure. Certainly this isn't the machine to be running Photoshop on while you watch re-runs of You Suck at Photoshop.
The keyboard bothers me a little (but then, a lot of things bother me, just a little bit). The period and comma keys are a little narrow for my liking -- but it beats the keyboard layout of the Dell Mini 9 and the EeePC I saw over at Best Buy. It's sort of like if you had a flight of stairs in your home but the last two steps were a little more narrow. You get used to it, but it's not exactly something you enjoy. That said, in this continued analogy, all the other stairs are close to normal sized, and so I'd say that the keyboard, while certainly not full-sized, comes as close to it as possible while maintaining the compact netbook form factor. The trackpad is a little small for my liking, but this was the case on nearly every netbook I saw.
What's really impressive about this machine is that for $350, this is a rather solid deal. I can see this particular model -- or netbooks like it -- becoming increasingly popular with enterprise users down the line, particularly for those users who already have a desktop at their... well... desks. It has ports galore off the sides. It has just enough oomph to run Office 2003 for your basic productivity-type needs, enough space to store your Neil Diamond mp3 anthology. It has an interesting facial recognition and webcam fun/toy app that you probably won't use.
Oh, speaking of mp3s, the sound from the stereo speakers is tinny but loud enough to do a speakerphone-like conference with someone over Skype. It's sort of the sound quality that I'd expect from a notebook this size, so I guess my expectations must've been not too high to begin with.
So I'm actually going to give this four stars. Then again, five stars would probably notch the price up a bit, at which point you'd probably have to give it four stars because the price was higher than most other netbooks. Thus, we are at an impasse, and so I end my review here.
ADDENDUM (6 months later):
Several months later, I must update my review, after now owning an MSI Wind U100 myself and having experienced the keyboard first-hand. (I wonder how many keyboard reviewers have used that pun.)
The keyboard on all netbooks is a miserable experience. The MSI Wind I suppose is marginally better, but outside of the aforementioned issues with the really narrow comma, period, and forward slash keys, all the keys are sort of tiny. I have big fat fingers, and so this is a problem for me. If you have long, spindly fingers, you may enjoy the keyboard on the MSI Wind U120 and other netbooks. If you have long, spindly fingers, you may also want to audition for commercials that make stuff look big where you're supposed to hold some new product.
Still give it a four-star rating, though. This is a sturdy little sucker. My daughters have both dropped the machine from wuthering heights, and not-so-wuthering heights, and generally abused the plastic casing to no end. That was the point, by the way -- I didn't want them mangling up my Macbook. But the MSI Wind continues to hold up despite the rough-housing. I suspect that if the kids were old enough to read, they might find the keyboard appropriately-sized for their little fingers. But alas, they aren't yet reading age, and by the time they will be old enough to read and to type, the keyboard will probably be too small for them. So we are at an impasse, and so I end my comment here.

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