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A Video Tour of the MSI Wind and Other Netbooks
Ken E. writes "UK mobile tech site Mobile Computer has posted a nice 10-minute video that gives a tour of the MSI Wind, and shows it alongside the two other Intel Atom-powered netbooks, the Acer Aspire One and Asus Eee PC 901. The site also has photos that show the three netbooks together to give a good idea of the differences in size. The MSI Wind goes on sale today in the UK (a week ahead of the US) for £350 (around $700). Not cheap for a supposedly low-cost laptop, but the MSI Wind looks like the best of the bunch so far."
By what criteria? If low cost is a very significant criterion for netbooks, then the expensive one will never be "best". Thats like saying a Hummer is the biggest compact vehicle.
Engineering is the art of compromise.
with computer hardware kit one dollar equals one pound so it will probably cost $350 or there about.
> The MSI Wind goes on sale today in the UK ... for £350 (around $700). Not cheap for a supposedly low-cost laptop
£350 doesn't make it "not cheap for a supposedly low-cost laptop", it makes a regularly priced laptop.
There is no way you can do some serious work without those keys
Yes, you can. At last, emacs and vi users can agree on something.
I guess the price/weight/performance sweet spot is different for different users and applications. Something like the Wind would be light enough for me to take on a trip without cursing the weight, but with enough storage to dump the contents of a few of my camera's 4-8Gb CF cards, and with enough power to do a bit of image editing before I come home. Before the eeepc, sub-notebooks tended to have mid-range specs and a 50-100% price premium over a comparable 'luggable' laptop. There were simply no budget alternatives except picking up an ageing Sony or Toshiba on ebay. Now we've got a range of options from the tiny but limited 701 to a respectably-specified MSI that's at the low end of the budget price range, but still perhaps a third of the weight of a cheap 'desktop replacement' laptop. Choice is good!
May I ask, and I stress this is not a troll (I was considering buying one):
Why do you think it's good value? I was literally hand on wallet, about to buy an eeePC 901, when I realized that, at $600, it was actually *more* expensive than the smallest Acer laptop next to it, which was about 50% larger, but was a fully fledged laptop.
I think that this trend of making low cost laptops expensive has gotten out of hand. Low cost is low cost. If the eeePC costs more than a second hand ThinkPad X40 but has half the power, is nowhere NEAR as durable, has a vastly inferior keyboard, then what's the point of the eeePC other than being just the next gadget to have?
Comparing my old (circa 2004) X40 to an eeePC was an eye opener. It's not hugely larger, but is a fully fledged laptop. And a damn good one at that. Personally, the best choice for ultra portables is to buy up X40s from eBay, put Xubuntu on them, and be done with it. 1/3 the price of an eeePC and I can actually do proper work on it.
I hate printers.
Just got done watching the financial news where they said yesterday was the worst single day for stocks since the great depression. I know that I've had a lot more folks coming to me to fix what they have or to buy used,because new is just out of their price range. And I'll be adding a 7600AGP to my machine this week simply because the gas prices are taking too much out of my wallet to let me build the dual core I want. But as always this is my 02c,YMMV
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
Since when has vi relied on PgUp and PgDown and arrow keys? The beauty of vi is that you don't need to use the numeric keypad, cursor keys (or mouse for that matter).
Man, I don't know when a 1.6 GHz Intel and a gig of RAM became "lacking", but you must have had trouble using computers before about two years ago.
I've upped my standards, so up yours.
There is no way you can do some serious work without those keys.
There's no way you can do "serious work" on these machines at all. Tiny keyboards, tiny, low-res screens, slow CPUs, etc, etc.
A docking station might bring them close to be useful for "serious work", but even then they're lacking in things like CPU power, RAM and disk space.
This is complete rubbish.
My best laptop ever was a Toshiba Libretto - a little smaller than a standard paperback book. Yes, you can type perfectly well on a keyboard that size. Yes, Emacs runs just fine - and if you don't like the keymappings, remap them for heaven's sake!
My Libretto struggled with KDE3, but ran perfectly well with lighter window managers. It had a full Oracle installation and a full Apache installation and I used it when going into clients to do product demos. 'Where's the server,' they'd say, and I'd pull it out of my pocket and say 'here'.
If the screen hadn't died I'd still be using it now. 'Smaller' and 'lighter' (and 'reasonable batter life') are what I want from a laptop. I don't need vast processing power, and 20Gb of disk sounds enormous to me. Dammit, I have live e-commerce servers serving dynamic websites on the net with less disk, less memory, and less processor power than an EEEpc. People who think these are low power machines simply don't understand computing.
I'm old enough to remember when discussions on Slashdot were well informed.