Wind speed on the rise

NETBOOKS ARE notoriously underpowered machines: Just powerful enough to get you on-line, playback some video or blog away, but not enough to kill the crap battery life outright.

This characteristic has been etched in stone from the get go. It is part of how things were worked out by Intel so as not to step on Core 2 toes.

However, no -one said you couldn’t mess around with the firmware once the system had been built and get some extra mileage out of the system. That’s just what MSI has done with their popular Wind U100 kit.

The company has released the 1.09 update to the famous Netbook and given its unwitting client base a surprise.

What does the new BIOS do? Well, you can control the overclock on the little lappie in 8%/15%/24% levels with a Function key combo and increase video memory allocation in the chipset. This not only puts you at 2GHz speeds, but it’ll also get you past the starting line in some basic 3D applications. We’re pretty sure that the Atom architecture will benefit greatly from the fact.

Once the 1.09 went up, the previous versions (lots of bugs, they had) were cut down, leaving everyone with a universal 1.09 update. Connoisseurs will likely scream “But it was there from v1.08!” Yes, well, it took 1.09 to reach the outside world.

It’s gonna be a fun time watching the other Netbook players trip over themselves to put out magical BIOSes like this one...

L’INQ
MSI Wind U100 BIOS update page