MSI Wind Nettop 120 XP PC Review

Page 5 – General impressions

The contact with Wind Nettop was quite pleasant, considering the group of users its intended for, MSI had put a lot of effort in making things easy for even the biggest rookie. From the very first powering of the computer, from a specially assigned partition, with just few clicks, Windows XP is installed.

The colourful screens during the installation oddly bind with my idea for the four elements. Or at least Earth, Fire and Water.

But i expect that lot's of you would point out that Windows XP is a aging system and while that is true, sadly there is no other Microsoft OS that is capable to provide comfortable work with the available hardware. Then again there is more than Microsoft out there. As you can clearly see the absolutely free (and quite popular at that) Ubuntu Linux is working just nicely with Wind.

Everyday routine activities are breeze – music, word processing, spreadsheets, browsing the Internet, all those are performed with ease, the machine doesn't flinch even doing all these at once. Movies ain't problem too, as long as you don't want them to be HD. With 720p ones things are bearable, but 1080p resolution is almost too hard to deal with. I say almost, because if you don't mind blurring in dynamic shots then it could be considered bearable to watch.

Games

One of the other things the home computer is often used are the games. Quite understandable, Wind Nettop deals with games from the near and not-so-near past games just as good as the mobile Wind. Still, we tested two more popular games the minimum requirements of which are close to the maximum the computer provides.

Both World of Warcraft and Dawn of War could be played quite comfortably as long as you don't insist on doing that on maximum details, lowering them just a little is enough though.

Temperature and noise

Wind Nettop is very quiet and that is to be blamed on the passive CPU cooler, the quiet hard drive and the virtually noiseless system fan. In fact the only component generating any noise (and revealing the computer is on) is the optical drive. The temperatures measured during testing can be defined as normal. The usual temperature in idle mode is about 30-32 degrees centigrade (at 15 degrees room temperature) and under continuous 100% load did not go past 57 degrees. As whole that's not much, but as we mentioned early if the hard drive is replaced with a warmer one and combined with higher (summer) air temperature and a sunny window, the computer might suffer from nasty overheating.

Moding

Well, the case doesn't allow much, nor needs much. The most obvious possibilities are the following three:

• Replacing the hard drive with CF/Microdrive for the needs of the OS only
• Converting one Sata connector to eSata
• Mounting quiet 80 mm fan on the side panel against the processor cooler

Of course they are unnecessary, I'm merely allowing my thought to wander :)