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Our review unit came with an optional six-cell battery, which results in a slightly thicker machine. However, it’s a neatly integrated package, and it looks like much less of an afterthought than the bulky battery offered for HP’s MiniNote.

Battery Life Results

MSI Wind - Battery Life Test

Battery life in minutes
Longer bars are better

With the screen dimmed to around 60 per cent brightness levels – which on this machine wasn’t too far off the Eee PC on its brightest settings – we managed to get a useful six hours and 23 minutes of light use away from a power source. That was with Wi-Fi and Bluetooth turned off, but it’s ideal for standard word processing tasks.

This dropped to around three hours when running a looped video, with the brightness turned up to full and with Wi-Fi activated. It’s not quite a match for the Eee for overall battery life, then, and how much extra the six-cell battery costs remains to be seen.

The 1GB of DDR 2 memory copes fine with Windows XP, the OS booting in a reasonable amount of time. A second memory slot is allocated for a further 1GB. Unfortunately, we weren’t able to put the Wind through its paces for benchmark results – firstly, because we had a pre-production sample, and also because the Wind’s 1024 x 600 pixel resolution is below that of the minimum 1280 x 800 we use during PCMark and 3DMark tests.

MSI Wind notebook PC

Curves courtesy of the MacBook Air?

The MSI offers 80GB of storage space as standard, verses a maximum of 20GB in the Asus 901, helping to level the cost difference if you do opt for the six-cell battery. In this case, it’s a regular 80GB hard drive, rather than Flash, although a speed of 5400rpm is in-keeping with the average laptop.

Cloud based data management

Latest Comments

Dumping

Dumping in this context is giving away at very low price and likely below cost, specifically to undermine competition.

see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dumping_(pricing_policy)

In many case this is illegal although the problem with software is that you can argue the cost is zero. Still the EU has done some good work so it seems reasonable to suggest they should look at the price charged for XP on these devices

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Dumping?

spegru, what do you mean by 'dumping'?

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Linux version has lower spec -- a monopoly issue?

The linux version looks like it will have a lower spec, e.g. only half the memory of the XP version, no blue-tooth, and no 6-cell battery option.

These different default specs make it hard to work out what, if anything, MSI and others are charging for XP licences: perhaps this is a deliberate policy --- of course Microsoft could not possibly be imposing a constraint that requires companies to refrain from shipping direct non-XP equivalents. That would be one way of hiding any activity that might interest some regulators, such as leveraging an existing monopoly position to gain advantage in a new market ... something frowned on in many jurisdictions.

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