TekPicks

On Friday I posted my first thoughts on the MSI Wind, coming away disappointed after a couple hours of use. Despite my initial reservations about the Wind, I decide to give it a fair shot this weekend, using it for all of my computing tasks. Understanding the device was not necessarily designed for some of the work like photo editing, I simply want to see what it would be like on a netbook. Overall, the MSI Wind performed well. I used web apps since loading CD/DVD based program would be a bit of a pain involving creating a an ISO file and transferring to my thumb drive.

Google Docs, WordPress, Gmail, and Sumo Paint all performed nicely, making this a viable second or third computer for me except for 2 dealing breaking issues: the size of the screen and that damn bouncing cursor. By yesterday I thought I was getting used to the screen size until I switched back to my 17″ widescreen HP laptop or dual 22″ Samsung monitors on my desktop – no comparison. But nor should there be. However, for what I need/want the unit to do I am unwilling to sacrifice the size of my display. That said, I wonder if I could have even overcome that issue if the cursor was not so freaking annoying. Typing for any length of time saw it randomly moving all over the screen so often that I just gave up using it for typing anything longer than a sentence.

Do netbooks have their uses? Certainly. They are affordable ways to add a small, compact computer to the kitchen, den, or travel bag for light browsing and email activity. Will they replace a full size machine? Not in my opinion.

Grab It: MSI Wind U100-432US 10-Inch Netbook (1.6 GHz Intel Atom Processor, 1 GB RAM, 160 GB Hard Drive, XP Home, 6 Cell Battery) Black