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We have collected 2 reviews of the MSI Wind U123. Experts rate MSI Wind U123 8/10. Reviewsor.com helps you find reviews, best prices, user reviews of the MSI Wind U123 and MSI Netbooks.
People buy netbooks for two reasons: They’re extremely portable and they’re pretty darned cheap. The MSI Wind U123 satisfies both criteria and throws in a bonus: Incredibly long battery life. We tested battery life by playing (and in this case, by replaying) a movie (Boogie Nights) that we ripped from DVD, encoded to MPEG-4, and copied to the computer’s hard drive. It’s a good thing we enjoy this movie, because we were able to watch it three times before the Wind’s nine-cell Lithium-Ion battery finally petered out. That’s right: This little device ran for a hair more than six hours. The fat battery adds almost a full pound to the package—this model weighs 3.2 pounds compared to models with more conventional three-cell batteries that weigh just 2.3 pounds—but when you find yourself far from a power outlet, you won’t mind the trade-off. Besides, the battery’s bulge tilts the computer’s keyboard up at an angle that renders typing more comfortable—and it makes a great handle. Like many of its competitors, the Wind U123 is powered by Intel’s Atom N280 microprocessor, which runs at 1.66GHz, and has access to 1GB DDR2 memory.
MSI's second Wind (netbook, that is) offers more of the same: Decent performance, value, and a hackable Mac OS X box. It's been a year since the Wind U100, the "big" sibling to the MSI Wind U123, came out--and the similarities between the two netbooks are eerie. Both run Windows XP Home Edition, and both carry 1GB of RAM, a Webcam and mic, and essentially everything else, except the U123 features a bulbous nine-cell battery and the 1.6GHz Intel Atom N280 processor (versus the U100's N270 CPU). In short, same stuff, different day. That CPU upgrade doesn't amount to much of a difference. Oh, sure, the U123 will finish tasks a hair faster, but it's still in the same ballpark. While the U100 earned a mark of 36 in WorldBench 6 (about the average), the U123 barely edged ahead with a score of 37. As for the U123's large nine-cell battery, however, the PC World Test Center found that it lasted for 4 hours, 34 minutes under constant use, whereas the three-cell battery on the U100 survived for a little over 2 hours less--that's an obvious improvement over last year's model. (Of course, netbooks with longer battery life and more features, like the Toshiba NB205-310, are on the market too.) The only drawback to the U123's beefy battery is that it makes this netbook weigh as much as an ultraportable laptop--3.6 pounds, to be precise.