MSI Wind Review

As I stated last week, I ordered a MSI wind from amazon. com for $338.00.  I ordered with two-day shipping.  That order got lost by amazon and never shipped.  Amazon re-ordered the netbook for me at a higher price, after the order time for a fifty dollar rebate but put on next day shipping for free.  I called and spoke with someone about my order and they adjusted the price and I  asked about when it was going to ship, they had no clear answer, other then the date listed on the website.  The day it was scheduled to ship I called and asked if the netbook would ship and the CSR said that they ran out of stock and offered without hesitation to knock off $100.00.  I said that was fine with me,  then I realized that because of the re-order I missed that rebate.  I called again and the CSR said she would apply the $50.00 rebate for me off the price, she must have made a mistake and took $110.00 off.  So this wonderful device I got for 228.95 shipped.  the moral of the story, persistence pays off.  I will review the netbook as i get time and after the thing is set-up to my liking.

Will the Wind blow?

According to everything I have read and seen on youtube it looks like a great little system.  The specs are inline with most current generation netbooks.  It has the 1.6 atom processor, 102 GB HDD, 10 inch screen  one gig of ram, 802.11b/g, 10/100 Ethernet, 3 USB ports, the right one is powered to support a optical drive or external HDD, and Bluetooth 2.0 with A2DP.  The reason I decided on that one ultimately above the Aspire One was integrated Bluetooth for Internet sharing connectivity with my phone, also it looks way easier to upgrade the the Aspire One.  I ordered it from Amazon a few days ago, but they have had a problem locating the device so it was reordered today with next day shipping.  I will do a review of it when it arrives Thursday or Friday.

MSI WIND TAKE APART

thanks frosty computers for the video

ASPIRE ONE TAKE APART

Thanks securityactive for the video

windows 7: first impressions

As Dena wrote Friday, she installed windows 7 on the Aspire one and we have found some cool things we really like as well as some things that need attention.  First I turn to the bad.  I was looking at 7 with the new multiple thumbnails in the task area and thinking, how many windows of the same program can you open and display still the thumbnails?  The answer, 10.  In daily use 10 instances of IE or   ten documents, is not absurd but highly unlikely.  I don't know if that is a number Microsoft will stick with or they just needed a number to stop at, hell maybe its dynamic.  on to the features I really like with the number one spot thus far going to thumbnail toolbars.  a close second is Shake. shake is the ability to minimize and maximize background windows by shaking the foreground window.  a video of shake is here.

Thanks  I started something for the tip.

Netbooks: The next fad or are they here to stay?

Right now netbooks are all the rage so it seems, but is it all just a fad? Don't get me wrong, I love my little Aspire One but are netbooks the next revolution? Take a look at where we have come from and where we are going. The first netbook form factor was the HP Omnibook300. It ran windows 3.11 and had a 40MB hard drive or a 10MB Flash version. If you were going have that kind of tech you certainly were going to pay for it, the drive based version cost a grant less then $2,000.00, and that sexy flash version was going to set you back $2,370.00. they tried again with UMPC's. that name brings to mind devices like the Sony UX, and the Samsung Q1 but by and large these items were flops. Now we are back to where it all started with the current versions of netbooks. I think the price for the Omnibook keeps it out of reach of most us and the radical change from what we knew of computers kept the UX and Q1 out of society at large's hands. With today’s netbooks I believe that the price is right and the form factor is not sacary for people to embrace. I think that people didn’t want to spend a bunch of money on a device they may not like to use.

EEEat that

Acer is expected to ship more netbooks this year then ASUS, the company that started the craze.  Acer says it will ship six million of the little suckers by the end of the year compared to ASUS's five million.  the reasons behind this are varied but size, of lack of in this case have a lot to do with it.

Source

Aspire One + Windows 7

Microsoft has always had a calling certain key areas in computing. The most recent development has been in the netbook arena, where devices, services, the Internet, and cloud computing all converge to make a beautiful computing experience. To be useful, a machine to run such a thing would have to be huge, right?

Wrong. I swiped the Aspire One from James, and took some time to play with it before asking the question "Would 7 run on it?" Last week, PDC attendees were granted access to an early build of Windows 7 that is surprisingly and refreshingly stable. So fate had me install Windows 7 on the Aspire One.

The install was quick and very similar to that of Vista's installer. After the second phase of installation, the sound card and video card were detected, but only the video card was properly installed. On my other laptop, neither the video or sound drivers were working properly. Score one for the little guy.

Upon boot, an item to note for the laptop/netbook crowd is the commitment by Microsoft to greater DPI scaling ability. In the personalization menu, we now have a choice to make our scaling "Medium" or 125% increased. This doesn't sound like a big deal, but sacrificing screen real estate for portability, you also need the readability.

A few things that don't work:
Wireless. The wireless is not detected at all for the Aspire One, and the work around so far is to download the Vista driver from the manufacturer's website, then install and you should be good to go.
Sound. Sound is there, but the driver isn't what it needs to be, so certain sounds will have a popping noise to them. This is corrected by getting the Vista driver or using Windows Update after securing the wireless.
Media Center. Media Center is a little jerky even though Aero is completely enabled and working. I suspect this is due to the video card itself and not the drivers.

Thanks for reading our blog.
-Dena

Aspire one review

Hey guys and girls a few days ago I bought an Aspire One netbook and I have to say, I absolutely LOVE this thing. I look and the netbook running xp and vista and I think, that is what I wanted in a notebook. it runs Vista smooth as silk and rather fast given the atom processer and one gig of ram. I have looked at upgrading the ram and adding Bluetooth but that looks more then I can do. Netbook to me look like affordable full functioning laptops that will spread computer use to the rest of the world finally fulfilling bill Gates dream to have a computer in every home and on every desk.

As side note I wrote this on the aspire one running Vista. I think this will become by blogging pc.