Nick Race11 June 2008, 4:00 PM
Eeegads! It’s the Wind, breathing new life (in the form of very nice specs) into the rampantly popular ultra-cheap, ultra-small notebook space.
Page 3 - User upgrades, batteries and conclusion
We took the opportunity to strip down the MSI Wind, and figure out how far you could take it. The hard disk drive, using a 2.5in standard SATA notebook style hard disk drive can be swapped out for anything in the same size bracket. If you were really cheeky, you could even theoretically install one of WD’s new VelociRaptor 10,000RPM performance hard disk drives (as it’s 2.5in) though we would strongly suggest you monitor it very closely for heat and it would definitely put a dent in your battery life.
Closer to reality, upgrading the 80GB hard disk drive to something with a bit more room (WD do a 250GB drive in the same Scorpio range) is certainly achievable.
Further good news is that the Wind’s default 1GB of RAM still leaves an empty SO-DIMM slot, allowing the user to upgrade the Wind with another 2GB of RAM to the 945’s hard limit of 3.25GB. Now we’re really flying.
Popping the casing off the back of the Wind is a simple process, involving nine screws and a steady hand. We had no problem with it at all, and with the Wind’s basic motherboard layout, there should be no problem getting your hands dirty.
Last but not least, the Wind’s battery came under scrutiny. MSI have chosen a removable battery pack, so no ruling out carrying a spare if you know you’re going to be away from a wall socket for any great length of time. Keep in mind the Wind will also ship with either a 3-cell or 6-cell battery, depending on which shipment you’re lucky to purchase from Altech, so asking before laying down your cash might be in order if it’s a concern for you.
We ran the Wind through a battery rundown (running Windows Vista) with Wi-Fi on and saw a battery life of around 3.5-4 hours, unfortunately our time with the Wind was limited, so we weren’t able to run more rigorous battery life tests. It does point to good news though, as even three hours is a decent run for a notebook, let alone four. With Wi-Fi off, you may even see times running to 4.5 hours on the 6-cell battery.
Though the 6-cell battery does lend itself to a good run time, it does add to the weight, with our model weighing in at 1263g.
Our overall opinion of the Wind? It’s good work. Though its physical design may not appeal to everyone, the technology under the skin is as good as it gets at this kind of price point. Intel’s new Atom processor performs its job admirably, there’s plenty of storage, it’s slightly user upgradable and the battery life is excellent.
If you’re in the market for one of the second generation mini notebooks, then consider the Wind, I know for sure a few people around the APC offices have already made up their mind. Now just to choose black, white or pink?