- Sunday, 12 July 2009
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You are never too old to be what you might have been - George (Mary) Eliot (Evans)
MSI blowing up a storm about Wind
MSI is planning new versions of its Wind netbook and is already stirring the press into hysteria about them.
Alreadly Laptop is enthusing that the first Wind release back in June “put big-name manufacturers on notice that a little known manufacturer could churn out a quality product. Turns out that was only MSI striking the match.” Gosh.
Apparently MSI’s Director of US Sales Andy Tung plans to keep the “Wind flying ahead of the competition”. Double Gosh.
After getting quite breathless about the Wind, the magazine actually squeezed some news out of Tung.
It looks like the new Wind U100 will be available in the coming week. Its will be delivered with a 3-cell battery and Windows XP and will set you back $399.
There will be a business-focused Wind U120 which will have SSD and hard drive options, and 3.5G connectivity. This will be released in the US in late November or December and will be priced under $600.
One thing Tung mentioned that was surprising was that Linux netbooks are returned four times as often as ones that run Windows XP. It is not clear if punters didn't like Linux or the Wind didn't run so well on it µ
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I've heard from techies that even they can't put up with the included distro on the Wind.
MSI is considering switching to another linux distro. They are currently putting Suse on the wind and are thinking of Ubuntu for future winds.
"Linux netbooks are returned four times as often as ones that run Windows XP"

The key piece of info missing from that claim is how many Linux netbooks are sold relative to those with Windows XP.

There are other factors that would completely change the picture too: is he talking only about MSI netbooks? Or about netbooks in general?

Also consider that Linux netbooks tend to be sold as a poor second hardware option to the Windows-loaded boxes. They often come with with half the battery capacity, often with lower storage capacities, and in one case, with a much weaker webcam.

In other words, are they being returned as part of an upgrade to the better hardware platform?


A read of the original article leads me to believe that the problem was the interface. I've seen a couple of Linux netbooks with dumbed down interfaces. I haven't seen a Wind (don't know if they are sold in Canada) so I don't know if they did something like this, but they did say that they used SUSE Linux, I've used it, and it's so much like XP that you'd swear they were twins, so I suspect this may be the problem.

Wayne
I just got 2 MSI Linux Wind computers.

Suse sucks. Can't even connect to the wireless networks available here (encrypted and unencrypted).

I have been using linux on and off for 7 years, and for the last 2 nearly exclusively linux at home.

MSI's return rate doesn't reflect upon Linux, but reflects upon SUSE. Too bad for Linux. Too bad for MSI.

D.