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Netbooks happen to be evolving for your past couple of decades, and this MSI Wind U160 could be the most refined instance with the breed we've witnessed yet. MSI lent us a single in the slim,
Office Pro Plus 2010, light-weight, low-cost bronze-colored baubles,
Windows 7 Starter Key, and we took it on the road for a week, testing its capability to get genuine perform done within the go. The tiny Personal computer aims to be a net-surfing, versatile netbook, and it nails it at a price that is way under the iPad.
At 1st glance, this newborn can be a beauty. With its "Fancy Gold" shade (we'd contact it far more of the classy-looking bronze), wispy two.2 pound bodyweight, sharp 10.1-inch LED-backlit screen,
Cheap Windows 7, and cleanse lines, it can be no wonder it won a product layout award. Its pulchritude goes a lot more than skin deep,
Buy Office 2007, because its 1.66GHz Intel N450 Atom processor is just quickly enough to breeze via processor-intensive jobs these as Photoshop picture editing and speech recognition.
That energy-efficient Atom processor is component of Intel's next-generation Pine Path platform, with MSI claiming an astonishing 15-hour battery life for this U160. With our continuous use, that did not look possible unless of course we stored the screen dimmed way down and allow it rest a lot of the time, but we did obtain a good 7 to 8 hours' well worth of use prior to the battery fizzled. Though which is a lot less time than marketed, it can be impressive — long sufficient to get a day's perform carried out.
A highlight with the design and style is the seamless touchpad, blending itself into the laptop's surface with a pleasant nubby texture. And that 10-inch screen, while at first seeming too small, is just large adequate to acquire the job done, and its graphics performance smooth ample to enjoy a movie or two to the plane. In fact, the size from the 10-inch display screen proved itself nearly perfect for the cramped airplane seat when that rube in front of me reclined his seatback into my lap.
The U160 as tested can be found for around $380, but there's a slight penalty for that rock-bottom value: its Windows 7 Starter operating system. Although it can be not crippled to just three applications running at the same time as Microsoft originally announced — and it was pretty much like other versions of Windows 7 — it wouldn't allow us change the desktop wallpaper. We found that annoying enough to go ahead and install a copy of Windows 7 Ultimate, which ran like the wind. It can be an aptly named notebook, indeed.
While we'd like to see greater than the standard 1GB of RAM on board, that configuration still allowed us to run five or six apps at the same time with barely any slowdown. Even though this is really a little laptop, its keyboard is almost the size of much larger notebooks, with keys that push down to a shallow depth but feel just right.
It's hard to believe you can get these kinds of a quality laptop for these a low value. With its upgraded Intel N450 Atom processor, it can be just rapidly enough to acquire function accomplished around the street. Will you be able to do that with an iPad? Or would a $500 ASUS convertible netbook be a better candidate? Like the iPad, this MSI Wind U160 is excellent for viewing movies and browsing websites,
Office Professional 2007, but unlike the iPad, you can choose your browser. We'll compare the two side by side, but for now, we're digging the value and versatility of this gorgeous laptop.
Via MSI