NbC: MSI Wind U115 Hybrid Review
July 27, 2009 at 9:23 am
Ports
The MSI Wind U115 includes all of the ports that you would expect to find in a typical netbook. There are no major omissions nor any surprise inclusions. The left side of the U115 Hybrid includes a Kensington lock, power input, fan vent and two USB slots.
At the very edge, you can see the Kensington lock which sits next to the power input socket.
You then have a the main side vent for the netbook (the right side doesn’t have one). The U115 was both quite and cool during operation.
You also get a couple of obligatory USB ports. These are just normal UCB ports and are non-chargeable as we saw with the Samsung N120.
On the right side of the Wind U115 sits an Ethernet port, VGA, a pair of audio jacks, memory card reader and a third USB port.
At the top edge, sits the Ethernet slot (10/100 LAN only), so no Gigabit support here. Next to this you’ll find the bright blue VGA (15pin D-Sub interface) port.
You’ll then find colour-coded audio jacks (green for headphones and pink for the mic), which was welcome. Next to this sits the 4-in-1 card reader that reads SD/MMC/MS/MS Pro memory cards. Lastly, you’ll find the third USB port.
With a SD memory card fully inserted, we noticed that it did stick out a bit which may annoy some people.
Features
The MSI Wind U115 Hybrid ships with an “ECO and Hybrid Storage Power Saving Function”, which is one of its big features. This enables you to disable the HDD when you are not connected to AC power and prolongs battery life. What this means is that you need to rely on the SDD in this mode and cannot access any files that you had on the HDD.
The Windows XP operating system is installed onto the SDD and therein lays one of the problems. The Wind U115 ships with an 8GB SDD, but the XP installation takes up pretty most of that space. Our review sample had just 1.19GB of free space on the C: drive when it arrived. However, by the time all of the critical Microsoft updates had installed we were left with just 602MB of free space.
Now there are ways that you can create some more space (although not significantly much more), but the average person is not going to know these tricks. Given the limited space, you are unlikely to use this feature for anything but internet browsing.
Another issue that caused a bit of frustration was that the setting for this ‘Eco’ feature is not remembered when you restart the netbook. This means that you have to remember to turn it back on every time you want to use it. We only found out the hard way during one of our battery tests unfortunately. We’re sure this is something that could be sorted with a firmware update, but whether this is part of the agenda or not is unknown at this stage.
When the HDD is switched off, you’ll notice that the green HDD icon in the System Tray has a small red cross icon next to it, denoting that it is disabled.
This compares to its normal functionality when the HDD is in use.
The Wind U115 also has a 1.3MP webcam placed in the middle of the bezel above the LCD display. It is worth noting that the US version comes with a 2.0MP webcam. MSI includes some webcam software called CrazyCam, but personally I tested the webcam with Skype. Image quality was very good and crisp and had no problems when in use.
You only get a solitary mic located to the right of the webcam towards the top-right of the display. This compares to the digital array mics found on most Asus Eee PC netbooks. As you can imagine, sound quality didn’t compare well to the Asus models with the mic volume sounding quite low.
Connectivity
The MSI Wind U115 netbook has all of your bases covered when it comes to wireless connectivity. The U115 ships with Wi-Fi Draft-N, which means you have the latest wireless standard straight out of the box. The wireless performance was very good, we had no problems connecting and picking up a signal was very quick.
MSI also ships the latest Bluetooth 2.1 standard with the netbook which improves power efficiency of peripherals connected to it. We also liked to see a dedicated Bluetooth status indicator, which you don’t often get with netbooks.
August 22nd, 2009 3:58 PM
I will appreciate to know where i can shop this amazing netbook.
I am writing from Nigeria and the good battery life will make huge business sense here.
Best regards.
Chidi