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Get your hands on the MSI Wind U115 Hybrid and you’d think it was your common or garden netbook. The specs are obvious: near–full size keyboard, 1.3kg and a 10–inch screen, the kind of thing that’s now as ubiquitous as every mobile fanatic packing an iPhone. But inside that plastic frame is something that makes the MSI Wind U115 Hybrid very special indeed. Read our full review and find out just what it is and why it’s so tasty.
Everything is standard issue on the U115 Hybrid. The 1024×600, 10–inch screen is fine, but you’ll be scrolling around web pages in order to see everything. Likewise the 93 per cent keyboard is fine, but takes a while to get to grips with. With Ethernet, Wi–Fi, three USBs and a VGA–out, it isn’t lacking either.
But the MSI Wind U115 Hybrid does make a play to be neat and unique in a very sharp way. It crams in two hard drives. That might sound like lunacy, but by loading it up with a 160GB HDD and 8GB SSD, MSI manages to get better skills from this neat little blighter than any of the other average netbooks you can pick up these days for next to nowt.
The idea’s basic, but boy does it work. The SSD is there to take care of apps and Windows XP. That means it ticks along a hell of a lot faster than other netbooks, in spite of packing the same sluggish Intel Atom processor. The HDD is supposed to take care of less labour intense extras, like docs, tunes, vids.
The good times don’t stop there. By taking it down double hard drive, er, drive, the MSI Wind U115 Hybrid has a battery life that’ll sate all but the most of hardcore movie junkies and spreadsheet fanatics. We squeezed eight hours out of it before having to find some juice. This is a novel approach to an already creaking concept. And one that’d have us stumping up the requisite readies in no time,
