Baby Laptop

Strange how all of a sudden 'netbooks' appeared on the scene over night. I've been in the tech industry for almost a decade now, and even this little revolution has hit me by surprise. It's a positive tech revolution though! Considering a good deal of what internet savvy people do is now part of what is called 'cloud computing' (another term to appear almost overnight). All the applications the vast majority of people need are online now anyway. The netbook revolution and it's timing makes perfect sense. Laptop manufacturers have been getting away with selling SUV equivlant laptops with high profit margins for years now. It took non-name brand firms such as Asus, and MSI based out of Taiwan to rock the boat, and now everyone including Dell and HP have jumped onboard. I don't think most of us need all those features anyway, but just like people that buy an SUV and drive it in town all the time, I think there was a feeling of safety knowing that you had it all just-in-case.

For my trip to Peru I wanted to have something that would last 3-6 hours on a charge, was baby small and easy to tote, had built in WiFi, and had enough CPU power to play back all my favorite video standards. After doing a bit of research and price searching I found the MSI Wind.

After searching high and low for the best price, I ended up getting the fully loaded version (6-cell battery, 802.11N wifi, bluetooth) directly from CostCo's website for $399 including free ground S/H. I read reviews of it getting between 4-5 hours of battery life, but so far I've only been able to get around 3 hours 30 minutes out of it on a full charge (I was watching DivX video, or using WiFi pretty much the whole time though). Not bad, but I think that with a little tweaking of the power/eco settings I could probably squeeze out more. I'm happy with it so far, and am using it right now to type of this blog in a hostel in Cusco, Peru.