MSI Wind U100

In the past we haven't been able to squeeze WorldBench 6 onto the miniscule hard drives of most mini-notebooks. With the Wind we succeeded, but its performance was predictably weak. It earned a wimpy overall score of 36, and some tests simply wouldn't run properly on the device.

The Wind's most touted feature is TurboDrive--a feature that amounts to overclocking at the touch of a button. Essentially, TurboDrive appears to be a power management shortcut that shoves the Atom processor into its (relatively) high-power mode. Battery life was a letdown: The three-cell battery that shipped with our unit lasted for just 2 hours, 24 minutes.

Navigating documents and files was reasonably painless. I even liked the single bar at the bottom of the mousepad, which serves as both the left and right mouse click--a far better solution than what HP's 2133 and Acer's Aspire One came up with for their mouse button layouts. However, the Acer Aspire One came through with a slightly bigger (and slightly better) keyboard.

There are some solid reasons to consider MSI's Wind. It's small and fairly light (about 2.6 pounds), and it's sturdy enough to take a beating. But other solidly-built mini-notebooks are just around the corner, including Lenovo's S10 and probably an entry from Dell this fall. My advice? If you can, wait.