We ordered an MSI Wind laptop (rebadged and sold in the UK as a PC World Advent 4211 Netbook) for work recently, and it arrived yesterday so I’ve had a chance to have a play with it.
My very first impressions were quite poor. It looked very nice, is small, light and seems reasonably well built. However, it wouldn’t power up. Every time it tried to boot past the POST screen, the hard drive squealed and it switched itself off. Even after fully charging the battery, it still refused to boot.¬¨‚Ć I thought it was DOA, but then, it finally started up properly and has been fine since. Very odd.
After the usual Windows setup stuff (it comes with XP Home), there was about 15 minutes of “Tech Guys” automatic customisation, no doubt adding nonsense to the machine I don’t need. Not that it matters, as Home is going to be replaced with Pro anyway.
Once properly up and running, I was able to give it a test run. It seems very quick (although has no bloat on it yet), and the keyboard is pretty good to type on. The trackpad is a little small, and the area on the right for scrolling isn’t marked – and the “scroll sensitive” area seems very narrow making it awkward to scroll. The trackpad button is very stiff and rather small too, and would benefit from protruding above the case rather than sitting flush.
Comparing it to an EeePC 701, the Wind would seem to be the better machine. It’s 1024×600 screen is both larger (10″) and higher resolution than the Eee’s, the keyboard is superior, and the unit isn’t actually much bigger. In fact, it’s slightly thinner, and appears to be a little lighter too. It has all the same ports as the Eee – VGA, three USB, audio, ethernet and an SD card slot. In addition, and unlike the Eee, it has bluetooth built in.
The 80GB hard drive is acres more space than the Eee’s 4GB, but it isn’t flash which may impact on battery life (which I haven’t tested) or resilience to knocks. The Wind has a built-in webcam, but its quality is rather poor compared to the Eee.
In terms of price, we paid just under ¬¨¬£240 for the Wind, whereas the EeePC 701 set us back about ¬¨¬£185. Is the extra ¬¨¬£55 worth it? When you consider that a copy of XP is around ¬¨¬£55, then you could argue yes – especially if you were going to put XP on your Eee anyway. Here’s where to get one.
