MSI's Wind U100: Hands-On Impressions And Hacking Plans

Continued from ‘Apple’s MacBook Air: A ‘Windy’ Hackintosh Alternative‘…

I bought my ‘Empire Black’ system last Friday for $429 after rebate ($479 out the door) from Amazon, with no shipping charge or sales tax (Best Buy brick-and-mortar stores are now selling them for $399.99 with no rebate requirements, albeit with sales tax). It arrived two days ago, and I began playing with it yesterday after filing my hands-on feature story for EDN’s November 13 issue. Service Pack 3 of Windows XP was preloaded, so getting it up-to-date with patches took very little time. In fact, I’m writing this particular piece on it (the keyboard’s great, and is a perfect fit for my admittedly diminutive fingers).

How does the MSI Wind U100 stack up against other comparably-priced netbooks I considered, such as Acer’s Aspire One, ASUS’s Eee PC series, Dell’s Inspiron Mini 9, and Lenovo’s IdeaPad S10? Glad you asked. The MSI Wind U100 delivers a unique set of features that I valued (others admittedly might have different need-and-want tiers) and that wasn’t found in its entirety with competitive offerings:

• A 10" LCD, and correspondingly, a well-proportioned keyboard
• A standard-format, high-capacity HDD versus a proprietary, diminutive flash memory module
• Windows XP, versus a Linux distro
• Built-in Bluetooth support, and
• The ability to easily upgrade the system to 2 GBytes of memory

At first glance, HP’s 2133 Mini-Note might appear to be a serious contender for my wallet’s attention; it offers more modern Windows Vista, after all, and even includes an ExpressCard slot. But it’s significantly more expensive in the Windows variants, and has a smaller LCD. Plus, it’s based on a geriatric Via C7 CPU, not the latest Nano processor that’s slowly lurching towards production.

So far, the MSI Wind seems quite speedy, at least with the tasks I have targeted for it (when I’m traveling, I barely have time to do email, web browsing and writing, far from anything more system-strapping). I’ve only got two notable complaints to date:

• The company originally planned on pairing the system with a six-cell battery, but a last-minute redirection resulted in MSI using a three-cell alternative…at the same price (six-cell units came later, and cost $50 more). I’m concerned that my portability aspirations will be hampered by insufficient practical battery life, no matter that I appreciate the size and weight of the diminutive Li-ion power source.
• Initial units also shipped with a Synaptics trackpad, but the company later swapped them out for Sentelic alternatives (presumably as a cost-savings move). My system has the latter trackpad, and drivers for it weren’t installed when I got the unit (at least MSI didn’t leave the Synaptics drivers on the system, as the company apparently did with some customers’ Wind U100s). The latest available Sentelic driver (newer than the one linked to by MSI’s online FAQ) finally allows for horizontal and vertical scrolling (of a fashion…it doesn’t work very well for me) and for disable of touch-to-click. But user feedback suggests that this touchpad’s overall operation is inferior to that of the Synaptics predecessor. And it’s not currently supported in a robust fashion by OS X…

About that earlier OS X mention…I’ve long been fascinated with hackers’ desires to install Apple’s O/S on non-Apple hardware. As soon as the initial developer systems started shipping, and shortly after Steve Jobs’ keynote that announced the move from PowerPC to Intel x86 CPUs, sites such as InsanelyMac and the Osx86 Project sprung up to satiate enthusiasts’ thirsts. And, as you can see from Wired’s recent coverage (also picked up by Slashdot and others), they’ve to date largely succeeded in turning the Wind into a Windows- (and Linux-) free machine.

Of course I’m going to try this myself I have a legal copy of OS 10.5 that I’m not already using elsewhere, so although I will be violating Apple’s software license terms, I won’t be cheating the company out of its well-deserved $100. I have a spare 1 GByte DDR2-667 SoDIMM left over from the system memory upgrade of my Dell XPS M1330. And I picked up a Dell TrueMobile 1490 mini PCI Express Wi-Fi module for $14.95 on Ebay (the TrueMobile 1390 module is a buck or two cheaper and reportedly also works, although it only supports 802.11b/g, not also 802.11a as with the TrueMobile 1490). I’ll probably swap out the HDD for a SSD while I’m at it. And I even ordered a custom black-background skin with a tongue-in-cheek graphic superimposed on it:

I’ll regularly report my status here at Brian’s Brain as the project proceeds.