MSI Wind

I loved the Netbook class; the MSI Wind was such a fun device that you could take everywhere. Decent battery, good screen and fantastic keyboard.

I use a Casio B.O.S.S. or other similar electronic diaries for this sometimes. I usually type in shorthand since the screens are small. I was going to pick up an Alphasmart a while back but felt guilty for how little it would be used, and ended up in Nano on my old MSI Wind... It's still amazing how much you can do with these devices. So I'll have a movie open, Falkon on the side, and several terminal sessions. Semi-distraction free since browsing is costly and the movie will be something I've seen before... For the regular desktop and distraction-free feel, I like to use Breeze for MS-DOS in DOSBox, or mcedit.

That's interesting, yeah mine has a fan but it is normally impossible to notice if the noise level in the room is even just a little bit above "quiet". Same with the original HDD, which on mine was spinny. I don't recall ever hearing it in operation. I replaced that with an SSD (be sure to clean the fan venting area while you're in there if you do that) but the before/after change didn't exactly blow my mind. For a hacker it could be great. You could do a LOT with it. Most development and scripting tasks are easy. However I would strongly recommend a separate pointing device, as it's a pretty substantial upgrade to the user experience. For web browsing, Falkon and 3-4 tabs max can work pretty well but modern JS SPAs probably wouldn't be very fun (if they'd even work in Falkon). I use Dillo a lot myself. I remember hearing about the Samsung, that's too bad about the white screen problem. I think the biggest problem I've had with the Wind was that the power button's blue LED failed, but all the other LEDs work and the button itself is fine.

You got me thinking...I still run my MSI Wind netbook (RIP Zareason!), and it's worked great with both Haiku and Q4OS recently. The keyboard is a near-disaster in some ways but after configuring a bunch of workarounds it's reasonably comfortable. I took it on a trip to Sicily soon after purchasing and have fond memories of using it and my n810 "media center" for that trip. I didn't have WiFi at the guest house where I stayed so I ended up getting my work done from the front of a tiny cafe in Noto, stooped over the tiny screen, but very much geeking out. The form factor is still really kind of cool when I'm in the mood to play with it, but once anything with cords needs to attach to it, it starts to look kind of overwhelmed IMO. Still, to this day I'd rather build stuff on it than on my phone. But that probably has a lot to do with things like muscle memory, maybe in addition to the fact that a properly-configured desktop OS (esp. with keyboard workarounds) is just something else when you're ready to work.

"... I still run my MSI Wind netbook ..." Were the MSI Winds fanless, or did they have a fan? And the hard disk, I assume, wasn't a SSD? I ask because I just noticed kids of our relatives using an abandoned Wind as a toy (to play "work"). They claim it is "broken", but who knows. I sneaked behind their back and tested the keyboard for typing -- it felt really good! A pity to see a potentially useful machine simply lying around like this, especially when my country needs to help out close to 50,000 war refugees from Ukraine. Our CS students refurbish laptops for the refugees -- this one could make an excellent machine for an Ukrainian hacker, or any other user with modest needs. Another excellent netbook was the Samsung NC10 [1]. Really good keyboard (93% of full size), sturdy build in general, screen hinges reach about 180 degrees, and a "fanless mode", that is, you can adjust the fan speed with a hotkey. Unfortunately, the one I tested suffered from its symptomatic "white screen problem" (described in the Wikipedia article). 1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samsung_NC10

Those were awful, especially the first gen, but I have fond memories of them since it was the first time young me could afford anything new and shaped like a laptop. The MSI Wind U100 with an Atom N270 CPU would even overclock. It didn't help, but it would do it.

I had some early model MSI Wind Netbook. What a great little machine. They were nice and hackable – I remember replacing the Wifi module with an OS X friendly model and getting a nearly perfect Hackintosh experience for a few hundred bucks, and in a form factor smaller than anything Apple had at the time. I think Chromebooks largely displaced the Netbook segment, which is sad. Feels like today you can get: A cheap, bigger laptop; An expensive, small ultrabook/Mac; A Chromebook.

My wife picked up a similar "subnotebook" for her classes (12.1" screen, though), and I've ended up taking a liking to it: an MSI Wind12 U230-040. They keyboard doesn't suffer from as much of the braindamage that some of the other devices in this form factor seem to sport (two fingers required for some common keys like insert, delete, page up/down, etc), and the 1366x768 resolution is quite usable. Video performance is respectable, you can stuff 4GB of RAM in it with a 64-bit OS, and I'd expect it to fly with an SSD. There's a few different versions of it; the -040 has a dual-core Neo X2, while the newer -087 models have a single core. MSI is notoriously lousy about making minor adjustments to the model numbers/names, but making substantial changes to the underlying hardware. Coming down the road (MSI is also notoriously late on delivering new models, apparently) is the U250, and there's a few specific spec updates on the roadmap for it (DDR3, processor and video updates) should make for a very capable small-form-factor computing device. My more general recommendation for any of these smaller gadgets, though, is to go into a store and handle them yourself. Use the keyboard, fire up notepad and write a little bit of code if that's what you were planning to do with it. The keyboards on a lot of these units are absolutely vile; they're all a compromise between key size and layout, and you'll want to spend some time with them to see if you can live with it.