Well I bought my wife one of those new U120 MSI Wind Netbooks yesterday. So I’ve been here installing it and getting it ready for her. Its quite a nice little netbook. I’m very impressed!
First Impressions:
This is a nice little machine with an Intel Atom processor, Full 802.11 a/b/g/n wireless networking, Bluetooth, a 1024×600 screen, 2.5″ 160GB hard drive, and a big battery. While setting it up I was able to do the whole thing without even plugging it in. I ran all day long on the one battery charge. The full size keyboard works pretty well. You can type on it just like its a regular keyboard except for the . key which I will list in the issues section below. It comes loaded up with Windows XP Home which is a far cry a better choice than Vista anyday.
This machine is primarily going to be used as an office machine to do Quickbooks, TurboTax, and some email. Though we are a mac shop around here we still find that QuickBooks is a lot more advanced on the PC than it is on the Mac. So we have this one machine that just runs that stuff for us. The current machine is a 3Ghz Celeron that I just recently upgraded with 1GB of RAM. Its been a great machine for doing what it does without any issue. But with the latest QB2009 and the newest TurboTax it suddenly started getting sluggish.
That is where I decided to take a chance on the new Netbook. And it seems to be working great! The 1.6Ghz Atom processor appears to be a little faster at the tasks that QB does. The 1GB or RAM is sufficient for what is needed as well.
Normally when I get in a machine, the first thing to do is clean off all the extra junk. I was able to clean off the install pretty well and remove just a little bit of crapware that was loaded onto the system. This is a far cry better than the amount I have to remove from a Dell or HP machine. Those have so much you might as well just reload the OS from scratch and go hunt down your drivers.
Next things that are needed are a few additional software pieces. I loaded up Firefox since I find that cures about 80% of all the spyware on its own. I then picked up Kapersky AntiVirus which will keep the other bad stuff away. Lastly I loaded up Mozy Backup. If you haven’t used Mozy before, I highly recommend it. iJustine has a referral code (iJustine if you dont’ want to look it up) that gets you 15% off the cost which is already pretty minimal. Simply put, $88 for 2 years of backup protection that I don’t really have to think about is just worth every penny! And by the way, shout out to iJustine. If you don’t check her blog and follow her on Twitter (@iJustine) you really shoot.
Issues:
1) The hard drive comes auto partitioned into two partitions. I don’t see any reason why it would be setup that way. So now I have a 30GB and a 130GB partitions. The larger partition isn’t even setup with anything on it by default. If this machine was going to be used for anything other than business, I’d probably use that for media files. But since this is strictly a work machine, I don’t think we’ll even need that other space.
2) Having no optical drive does make it more challenging to load software. This machine is specifically going to be running the accounting software my wife uses for managing our company. So those packages have to be loaded somehow. I found that I could pop the disc into my Mac, turn on sharing, do a Get Info on the CD and click Share, and its available as a share on the network. I just installed everything that way and it worked great.
3) Only 1GB of RAM. It seems that the big difference for the consumer to know about between the U100 and U120 models is that the U100 has a DIMM slot where you can put in a 512MB, 1024MB, or 2048MB RAM stick. So you can purchase it with 1GB but upgrade to 2GB. The U120 loses that slot in order to make room for the 3G wireless card to go in instead. Though I didn’t even order the 3G card, there is a spot for it and now I have 1GB of RAM soldered to the motherboard with no way to upgrade it. Fortunately, that doesn’t seem to be a problem here. I’m finding no need to go to 2GB at this point.
4) The , . and / keys are too close together on the keyboard. The keyboard is nicely sized and fits very well and seems to feel like a full sized keyboard with the exception of the , . / keys which are smaller than the rest and a little too close together. I cannot seem to hit the . key when I’m typing, I always get the / key. But again, this is going to be solved because this will be hooked up to a full sized keyboard, monitor, and mouse most of the time. It shouldn’t be a problem.
5) Poor instructions. There is a manual on the desktop in a billion languages. It is useful to have taken a look through it to find out that Fn-F11 is the key to toggle through various wireless modes. Hit it once to turn Wifi on, twice to turn Wifi and Bluetooth on, 3 times to turn Wifi off and Bluetooth on, and 4th to turn Bluetooth off and Wifi on. Once more turns them all off again. This wasn’t mentioned in the manual, just the label on the button. Had to figure out what it actually did and how. Same thing with Fn-F6 which turns on the camera.
6) No two finger trackpad. I am SOOO used to using multi-touch gestures on my MacBookPro that its hard to work with the one finger trackpad on here. Now this isn’t going to be an issue since this will be in the desk and hooked up like a desktop most of the time. But it sure was something I really missed. (I’m going to scroll down in this post with two fingers right now!)
Conclusion:
Man, this is an awesome little machine. I’m going to be recommending it around. I have someone who just asked about buying a new desktop for the kids at home. I think this would really fit. In addition, it seems to be a very good machine for building a Hackintosh. If you wanted to load up MacOS on something like this it is no problem. Last I saw, it appears everything is working great!
But for just doing regular web, email, and office work, this thing is awesome for very little money. However, I might go for the U100 next time just so that the ability to upgrade to 2GB of RAM if needed.
