HSDPA, general usage, and battery
Smooth operatorEquipped with a chunky six-cell battery, the Wind's puny charger takes a while to charge from flat, to the tune of around four hours. Once past this hurdle and with netbook in hand, the Wind U120H is easy to use, taking only a minute to boot into Windows XP and loading applications faster than the 1GB of on-board RAM would intimate.
Office 2007 is handled well and YouTube, the Internet favourite, plays back seamlessly, requiring around 45 per cent CPU load. Equipped with the Intel 945 Mobile chipset, sporting underpowered 3D graphics, gaming performance isn't great, averaging around 9fps when running Quake 4 at the screen's native resolution of 1,024x600.
We'd normally subject a laptop to a rigorous set of benchmarks designed to tax every facet of performance, but that seems marginally pointless with a netbook, where go-anywhere Internet is touted as the main feature. However, we ran a battery of regular tests on the original Wind, shipping with the same configuration, that you can find here. Clicking through will show you that the Atom is no match for a Centrino 2 or Turion CPU.
What we like is that the Wind U120H, when placed under prolonged load, doesn't become too warm to the touch, and that's all the more impressive considering the limiting dimensions that MSI has had to work with. The keyboard remains cool and the barely-audible fan is a boon.
Go-anywhere Internet
All the major mobile operators in the UK offer mobile broadband in one form or another, usually provided through a USB key with the appropriate modem built in.
3G-compatible modems and networks promise speeds of up to 7.2Mbps, but the reality is that most consistency run at lower speeds.
The HSDPA-equipped, network-free Wind U120H does away with the need for a (relatively) bulky USB stick and putting in a Vodafone SIM, in a part of town not conducive to decent reception, we managed to average 111KB/s when downloading AVG anti-virus - kind of handy seeing as the Wind ships without any.
Usage is as simple as clicking connect on the Ericsson Wireless Manager and you're on the web in less than five seconds.
Battery
The larger, six-cell battery, rated at around 50WHr, whilst protruding from the back and causing the chassis to slope a little, is ever so handy when out and about, to the extent that a four- to five-hour battery-life, using HSDPA, is eminently achievable when running tasks the Wind is designed for, that is, Internet browsing and basic spreadsheet/Word composition
Still, swap the 160GB mechanical drive for a smaller-capacity SSD and we could see another 20-30m eke out of the Wind U120H's battery.
