New toys

So like most folks, I’m hanging out today kind of watching the super bowl — but am also playing with a new toy, my MSI Wind netbook.  This is a nifty little device, running a 1.6 ghz, 1 gb, 160 gb HD, 10.1 inch monitor weight about 2 lbs.  The machine came installed by default with Windows XP — but part of the reason why I decided to pick up this little device was to have a platform to test Windows 7, and the netbook seemed like as good as place as any to test out the claims that this OS will take less resources, be more efficient, etc.  So, occasionally, I may jot down a few notes of my experiences using my little advice.

First thoughts are I like this little machine.  It has a full keyboard so I don’t feel cramped typing, has an expandable drive (so soon I’ll have 2 GBs on the machine), 3 USB drives, an SD card reader — all the stuff that you really need to get things onto and off of the machine.  The device seems fairly rugged and cannot believe how light it is.  I’ve tried the ASUS, Acer and HP netbooks and I really like the design that the folks at MSI have used here.  Oh, and the 6 cell battery — looks like I’ve been getting about 3 1/2 hours of burn time.  Oh, and this is quiet and cool.  The laptops that I have at home simply run hot (I’m rarely cold during the winter so long as I have my laptop).  This little device simply doesn’t put out much heat and is super quiet.  A nice, unexpected change from previous hardware used.

Windows 7…At home, I use a wide number of operating systems.  I have a couple of flavors of linux, XP and Vista (no mac since they won’t let me virtualize it), mostly to test various projects that I work on under different systems.  One of the hallmark of Windows installs tends to be scary installs.  I was pleasantly surprised to see that install tool approximately 18 minutes on this netbook — all hardware was recognized, drivers loaded.  Since, I’ve loaded Google Chrome, Office 2007, Live Writer (which is what I’m using now) and MarcEdit.  Overall, I’ve been pretty impressed with the way the system handles.  At this point, I have Chrome open, streaming a video from youtube (bruises from chairlift), 5 other tabs, IE with 3 tabs (one my exchange mail), 3 word documents, an excel document (~4 mbs in size) and MarcEdit and still have ~200 mbs of RAM free and not a hint of sluggishness.  This is something I’ll track as I continue working on this little box.

–TR