MSI Wind U135

The new platform Pine Trail, designed around the Atom processor N450 and N470, promises a battery life combined with faster performance. While the goal is not to turn in netbook a lightning war, but to earn 10 to 15% performance. We will now see how behaves the new family member Wind, the U135 comes standard with Windows Starter Edition 7. The gain in speed is really sensitive and autonomy, extended by low consumption of the new Intel architecture, it is the appointment?

The regulars of the MSI Wind U100 will be in familiar territory. Indeed, the chassis of the U135 is almost identical to its predecessor. The shiny finish of the hull is relatively sensitive to fingerprints, but almost all manufacturers have succumbed to this mode. However, the quality of plastics is good with a very slight effect on the glittery interior and a discreet design on the outer shell provides a netbook well done although a little thick. The 6 cell battery which exceeds below does not catch up this impression of a machine a little stocky.


Consistency technology seems lot of netbooks. As with the previous generation, release themselves and are very similar. After the 1005P Asus Eee PC and the Samsung N210, this configuration is powered by an Intel Atom N450 clocked at 1.66GHz, backed by 1GB of DDR2 memory and hard drive 250 GB From classic therefore a platform that is at par with other notebooks Pine Trail that we tested. With a score of 1440 in PC Mark 2005, an index to Windows 2.30 and PC Mark 2006 to 147, performance is actually up slightly compared to previous processor Atom N270 and N280 example. The score of the circuit graph has even doubled, but no need to make plans on the comet, it will of course be impossible to play 3D games money on such a machine.
In everyday use, this netbook is for small office, surfing, watching DivX movies, even HD 720p. A test on a 1080p movie that is to say in Full HD proved much less convincing. The CPU is often so overwhelmed with where unpleasant jerks on the screen, because the decoding of certain formats of HD files do that in software mode so without hardware acceleration.

A self-deceptive

It's a surprise, but both say at the outset, not good! For the record, we have also doubled this test facing the wrong result. Given for 7 hours 30 the MSI U135 comes painfully to spend 4 hours reading DivX continuous brightness of the screen to push back. In reality, a user will take more time, but this score is very disappointing compared to other netbooks Pine Trail that we tested under the same conditions (about 6 h 30). Measuring the voltage also shows a higher consumption of nearly 4 watts average of the other champions of the category as the Asus 1005p, for example.

An increase in comfort

With his Chiclets-style keyboard that is to say with key way "favors" well spaced, the U135 can type text without suffering too much despite the small keyboard, which is not designed to rewrite the 'Encyclopedia Britannica. Although seen, a function key is used to cut the touchpad to avoid typing in it accidentally. Without being multipoint touchpad that also progresses and proves acceptable to use with ability to configure vertical and horizontal scrolling. The presence of n Wi-Fi and Bluetooth is also a good point and ease further to provide a mobile phone for example. Note however the lack of 3G, which did not differ from the competition.