BEST TOP 10 NETBOOK

MSI Wind

MSI is best known for its high-end motherboards, graphics cards and gaming laptops, so we were a tad surprised when it entered the netbook arena with the MSI Wind. Don’t be put off, though — it’s actually rather good, despite its name evoking mild flatulence more than compact computing.

Design and usability

The Wind is a great-looking machine, but lets itself down with a fiddly little mouse touchpad that makes it awkward to browse the Internet — and that’s hardly ideal in a netbook. It does, however, have a great 10-inch matte display, which works well indoors and outdoors in direct sunlight. The Wind’s keyboard is fantastic, too. We were just as happy writing long documents as we were sending tweets.

Connectivity

High-speed 802.11n Wi-Fi comes as standard with the Wind, so you can (in theory) throw files around the air at speeds exceeding a 100Mbps wired connection. Bluetooth makes an appearance, as do three USB ports, a four-in-one memory card reader, and a VGA video-output port so you can pipe the graphics through to an external display.

Performance and battery life

The Wind is the first netbook we’ve seen that has an ‘underclocking’ button. Hit this, and it reduces the clock speed of the 1.6GHz CPU by half. Most users will find this mode a little too sluggish for anything other than reading text documents, so the Wind is most likely to be used as the netbook gods intended — running at full speed. Battery life on the standard Wind U100/U110 is pretty lame, thanks to its three-cell, 2,200mAh battery. It’ll last you around two hours, so we’d recommend keeping the power supply relatively close by.

Should I buy it?

The Wind is a solid netbook in most regards. It’s comfortable and easy to use, is well-designed and looks the part, too. It lets itself down with mediocre battery life, but it’s relatively affordable and quite stylish.

Places to buy: AMAZON.COM

By Cnet.co.uk