MSI Wind U100-053US 10-Inch Mini Laptop Review
October 28th, 2009
MSI Wind U100-053US 10-Inch Mini Laptop Review from David C Leaumont Dave. Superb Notebook!, What a superb laptop! Tiny in size, yet the screen is large enough to be very usable. The system comes with a 5400 rpm 80GB SATA Western Digital Scorpio hard drive, which is nice. The nicer part about the hard drive is that it is easily upgraded. I upgraded mine to a 250 GB 7200 rpm Seagate which swapped in without a hitch. It also comes with 1 GB DDR2 RAM, and has an extra slot that can hold up to a second 1 GB stick. Unfortunately, anything larger than a 1GB stick will cause the computer to not POST.
The screen resolution is limited to 1024 x 600, which is very usable, but it would be nice if it had options to go to a higher resolution to mitigate the size. Some applications are too large at this resolution to use with ease due to the increased need to scroll up and down.
The laptop is actually smaller than my day planner. And, the weight is low, but the laptop does not feel cheap. The hinges were something I worried about before buying the laptop, as my previous laptop had a hinge problem. But, the hinges are strong.
The ports on the laptop are very convenient with the exception of the power connection. It is on the side of the laptop, and with the small width of the laptop makes the power connection vulnerable to wear and tear when you use the laptop on anything other than a table-like surface. USB ports are USB 2.0, and there are three. The VGA port works well.
The laptop’s sound a bit anemic, but that is standard for most laptops.
The keyboard is slightly smaller than a normal keyboard, but nowhere near as small as the Asus Eee keyboard. It’s easy to move from a regular sized keyboard and back from the MSI without having errant keystrokes from muscle memory issues. There is an interesting function that allows some of the keys to be locked into a number keypad, but the keys are not labeled, so it is difficult to use. But, it is a feature that the keyboard allows.
The mouse could use a little work. The left/right click button is a single bar that see-saws back and forth. The plastic hear is cheap, and it bends over time. It is still functional after a month, and is a minor detail, but MSI could have done better.
I bought the 3-cell battery version, as that was all that was available at the time, and MSI was affected by the battery shortage. I get about 2 to 2.5 hours out of the 3 cell running several applications (large hdd usage). Not bad.
The key issue with the MSI is that there are many sites out there that cater to the MSI Wind and altering the software and hardware. Users have even modified Mac OS X (10.5.4) to optimize it for installation on the Wind. I currently have a dual boot Win XP (default OS) and Mac OS X (buy a license if you do so.)
The laptops comes with a bag which unfortunately will not fit the power supply.
There is no CD/DVD drive, of course, due to the size, but there are plenty of small external USB drives out there.
The car reader is something I have yet to use, but many online have mentioned using it to load OSes or software, as it is a bootable drive. In fact, the BIOS allows for a host of bootable drive options, which is nice.
When comparing this to the Asus Eee, two things drove me to the MSI Wind – 1) the full sized keyboard on the MSI and 2) the SATA drive that performs better than the solid state drive on the Asus.
A superb laptop! I highly recommend it if you want something very portable.
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