MSI Wind U115

According to MSI, the Wind U115 is the world's first hybrid netbook, thanks to the inclusion of both a flash memory-based SSD drive and a traditional magnetic hard drive.

Handling & Connectivity

The U115 has a very traditional look. Its matte black and grey colour scheme is standard for laptops, and lacks some of the imagination found on netbooks like the Asus 1008HQ or the Samsung N310. It's difficult to say it doesn't look just like the Wind U110 or the Medion Akoya mini E120. Be careful when you're ordering to make sure you get the right one!

On the keyboard, the keys themselves are large and responsive.  Some of them are slightly smaller than on a full-sized keyboard, but that doesn't really have a detrimental effect on everyday use.  The only problem is that, like on the Wind U100, the Fn key is at the bottom left-hand corner of the keyboard.  That's where the Ctrl key usually is, and because it's used in so many shortcuts, this leads to a lot of frustrating errors.  The touchpad, in front of the space bar, seems to lag at least a generation behind.  It was already too small on the U100, and it's still a problem here.

In general, we were disappointed by the webcam, whose image quality isn't great.  It tends to make you look red-faced, lacks detail and washes out over-exposed areas.   The microphone is far too weak, and you have to speak very loudly to make yourself heard.  One advantage is that it's beside the webcam, and not by the keyboard, which is usually a source of unwanted noise.

Even when it's working hard, the U115 only makes a moderate amount of noise.  When the very quiet fan does start up, you'll need to get within twelve inches of the case to hear it working. The rest of the time, watching movies or doing office work is entirely silent.

Around the outside, you'll find the following: three USB ports, one VGA output, an Ethernet port, a pair of mini jacks and an SD card reader, covering all of your bases.

There's nothing underneath, with no way of gaining access to the components.  However, this is a preproduction model so it's possible that that will change by the time it's available in the shops.

2 USB	USB, SD, 2 mini jacks, VGA
Touchpad	Webcam

Processor Power
The inclusion of an SSD drive is supposed to improve this computer's performance, but we weren't incredibly impressed by the results. The computer takes 44 seconds to switch on, and the Intel Atom Z530 holds everything back. While most other netbooks use an Atom N280 and have an indexed score of 20, the U115 is at 18. For reference, the Fujitsu-Siemens Amilo Xi3650 is at 100.

Because of the Intel Poulsbo US 15W chipset, playing video should be easier on this machine than on other netbooks. In practice, we couldn't really test this element. The first problem was that we found it impossible to use the VGA output with an external screen (and it wasn't for want of trying). Falling back to the screen's native resolution, 1024 x 768 pixels, we didn't manage to play any large HD video files. The U115 was clearly struggling, which is something we'll come back to in a future test.

Audio
The sound on the U115 is absolutely awful. The headphone output is dirty and ruined by interference. After listening to the speakers, we were left wondering if they'd been turned down, but in fact, they were at maximum volume.

Portability & Battery Life

Even before we activated eco mode, the U115 broke new ground in terms of battery life by lasting for 7 hours, a whole 50 minutes longer than our previous best performer, the Toshiba NB200.

In eco mode, though, which only uses the SSD but not the regular hard drive, battery life shot up to 9 hours 52 minutes. We really have to take our hats off to performance like that, especially on a computer that only weighs 1.3 kg.