MSI Wind U100

Notebook: MSI Wind U100 (Wind Series)
Processor: Intel Atom Z530 1600
Graphics Adapter: Intel Graphics Media Accelerator (GMA) 950
Display: 10.1 inch, 16:9, 1024x600 pixels
Weight: 1kg
Price: 500 euro
The MSI Wind U100, despite the new model designation, is still the same netbook that launched last summer in response to the Eee PC. While the chassis and basic design hasn't changed much, the Wind has picked up a few handy updates over the last couple months that help keep it competitive with the onslaught of new netbook offerings. The Wind offers a sturdy chassis that will take your constant handling in stride. The system is well built and covered in high quality paint that is very fingerprint resistant. Although the design comes off a bit bland, it's still a pretty good looking machine that will look the part in any situation, boardroom or coffee shop. While the original specs that called for an 80GB hard drive with 3-cell battery can still be found, most Winds on sale today pack 160GB and a beefier 6-cell unit.

We believe that a lot of people who never had a notebook will consider buying Wind PC U100. It is small and light, it has all you need from a notebook and it is as mobile as it gets. The battery life is not great, but it is still within acceptable levels. The 80GB Western Digital drive really helps a lot and 1GB of memory is enough for just about anything a normal notebook user might need. Realtek W-LAN uses Windows W-LAN manager; that is a bit primitive, as it forces you to type the password twice but it works quite well. We do believe that W-LAN can and will get a bit faster, but at least it works stable in four W-LAN environments we tested. Plastic is the biggest minus, as it leaves greasy fingerprint trails all over the small and cute case, but it’s nothing that a nice wipeoff cannot solve. From a design point, MSI deserves 9.5 of 10. We showed the machine to a dozen computer enthusiasts and non-geeks, including a few girls, and they all agree that this notebook looks great.

Intel Graphics Media Accelerator (GMA) 950: Intel Graphics Media Accelerator 950 is an integrated (onboard) graphic chip on Mobile Intel 945GM chipset. It is a faster clocked version of the GMA 900 and supports no hardware T&L (Transform & Lightning) accelleration (which is required for some games). 

Only older games can be played fluently with these graphics chips (if they were not too demanding). Shared memory graphic cores in this category got the advantage of less heat production and longer battery runtimes. For office, internet, image processing, and video editing tasks these graphics chips are still useable without any restrictions.