So, I dont (ever) do reviews of hardware products, but I thought I’d hammer out a few words on a new piece of hardware that I picked up: the MSI Wind.  Its part of genre of smaller sub-notebooks that were initially popularized by the Asus EEE.  I decided to pick one up because I knew I’d be spending this month and next doing home visits around Toronto.

My previous laptop — besides being old and rickety — was also large (17″) and heavy (5 lbs).  Coupled with the other stuff I have to lug around, I was looking for something small and light, recognizing that my needs were very modest.  Light emailing, blogging, and hooking into the virtual office to update patient files.

I ended up going with the MSI Wind for my purposes.  I tried the Asus EEE, but found that amongst the various models available in Toronto, the keyboards were tiny.  Miniscule, in fact.  The HP 2133 was another one I looked at, but it was a little more expensive ($700+) and came with Vista. Boo.  Dell came out with their own super light sub-notebook, but it came out before I picked up the Wind, which does come with Windows XP.

If you want specs, you can check out this website, but subjectively I’ll just say that it has done the trick.  Its about 2lbs and the size of a largish softcover novel.  The size of the keyboard is just large enough to accomodate adequate sized keys for my clumsy fingers, and doesn’t make many compromises for the sake of a form factor. 

One of the biggest problems that I just recently solved, however, was the touchpad that comes with it.  It was far too sensitive.  I’d be writing, and then the cursor would go to another position based on a phantom (or what would seem like a phantom) touchpad-click.  It was so bad that at one point I was considering returning the item.  

The MSI Wind, luckily, has some active boards that pointed me to the solution, which was an updated driver which I will be happy to host here –> Wind MSI Touchpad Driver, in case the original site goes down.

The updated drivers, I think, natively make the touchpad less sensitive, and also, thank goodness, allow me to disable it automatically when I’m using the keyboard.  

I’ve found the MSI Wind good value for money ($500) which is quite modest in its specs, but adequate for what I need to do.  If I had any gripes now, it would be in its battery life, which, for the 3 cell version that I have, can’t seem to eek out any more than a couple hours.  Perhaps there are other ways to squeeze out another hour, but I haven’t found them yet.