MSI Wind.Net forum member Doody has managed to get his hands on a MSI Wind prototype, and he's been testing it out and running benchmarks for a few days.

One of the main advantages the Wind has over current Netbooks like the Asus Eee PC and HP Mini-Note is the power-saving Intel Atom processor. So I was particularly interested in Doody's battery test. He managed to get 2 hours and 19 minutes of battery life from the 3 cell battery. That was with WiFi on, 50% brightness, and relatively heavy usage including benchmarking, running Windows Update, and playing Warcraft III for 15 minutes. In other words, you might be able to get up to 3 hours of life from a single battery if you're doing some light web surfing and/or if you turn the WiFi off and just use the computer for editing documents on the go.

You can read more aboud Doody's tests at MSI Wind.Net.

For the most part, the Eee PC 900 is identical to the Eee PC 700 series, except it has a larger, higher resolution screen and more memory, right? Well, there are a few other significant differences under the hood. For example, Asus packed two solid state disks into every Eee PC 900. There's a 4GB SSD for the operating system and program files, and an 8GB or 16GB SSD for extra storage (the 8GB disk comes with the Windows XP version, while you get a 16GB disk if you buy the Linux model).

The folks at the EeeUser forums noticed something interesting though. That 8/16GB SSD isn't as fast as the 4GB disk. If you compare the read/write benchmarks on the two SSD units in the Eee PC 900 with the read/write benchmarks for the Eee PC here's what you find:

• The 4GB SSD in the Eee PC 900 seems to be the fastes of the bunch.
• The 4GB/8GB SSD in the 700 series comes in second (The 8G model is actually installed in a PCI-E slot, not soldered to the motherboard, and seems to have a faster read speed than the 4GB, but a slower write speed).
  
• The 8/16GB SSD in the 900 series comes in a distant third.

If you have an Eee PC 900, you can certainly wipe the operating system from your 4GB SSD and install it to your 8/16GB disk if you want to. But these results show that the 4GB SSD read/write speeds are significantly quicker. So you're probably better off installing any operating systems to that disk. Which is probably fine if you only have one OS on your computer.

But if you want a dual or triple boot system it would be nice if the 8/16GB disk was a bit quicker so you could comfortably install an OS to that drive, leaving room for your initial operating system to breathe on the 4GB SSD.

[via jkkmobile]

The folks at Japanese site PC Watch snagged themselves a pre-release MSI Wind desktop PC. While this computer isn't exactly identical to the upcoming Wind laptop, it does feature the same low-power Intel Atom CPU, integrated graphics, and 1GB of RAM. So when PC Watch decided to match the Wind PC up against the Asus Eee PC 900 and the Asus Eee PC 701, it wasn't an entirely unfair comparison to make.

That said, I've never really placed too much stock in benchmarks. I'm much more concerned with real world performance. Which computer feels more responsive when doing basic tasks like surfing the web, manipulating office documents, or watching videos.

Still, if you're a benchmark kind of person, you might want to know that the MSI Wind seems to blow away both Eee PC models in some areas, while underpforming in others. So while the Intel Atom has gotten a lot of hype, it's important to remember that it's designed first and foremost to be a low power processor. It should deliver decent performance, and when performing some tasks, it will be speedier than a Celeron-M processor. But that's not really saying much, now is it?

If you asked me if I'd rather have an Atom or Celeron chip in my laptop, I'd definitely say Atom. But don't expect the next generation of low-cost ultraportable laptops to be significantly zippier than the current generation. If you want performance, you're going to want to shell out a few extra bucks for a PC that costs more than $800.

[via Small Laptops]