MSI Wind Top AE1900

Product: Wind Top AE1900
Website: www.msi.com/ae1900
System specifications: Intel Atom 230 Processor, DDR2 533 1GB, 160HDD, DVD, 18.5" WXGA 16:9 LCD Display, Ethernet, WIFI
Price: $599, £549 €580

MSI AND ASUS have been playing a game of oneupmanship with each other in netbooks and nettops. This includes all-in-one touch-screen computers in the MSI Wind and Asus Eee PC lines.

Both Asus and MSI offer computers that are just monitors with computers built into them. These are variants of their nettop PCs with touch screens.

Here we're looking at the MSI Wind Top Ae1900, the latest release playing catch up with the Asus EeeTop PC ET1602.

The device has a 1.6GHz Intel Atom 230 processor, a lower-end chip than one might expect, running on an Intel 945GC platform. This means it doesn't have awe-inspiring graphical capabilities, whereas the Asus equivalent has better ATI Mobility Radeon HD3450 graphics.

The operating system is Windows XP. It's been confirmed to The INQ the Ae1900 is not capable of multi-touch, even if Windows 7 is installed. Some similar PCs support multi-touch, such as the competition's T91 that we reviewed recently. This seems to be a trick that MSI has missed, although we've been told there is another model coming out to remedy this oversight.

The all-in-one screen is an 18.5-inch 1366x768 WXGA monster that is a good three inches larger than its Asus counterpart. It's big and sturdy enough to be comfortable to use, and it's a heavy beast at around 5kg. Just in case you forget that there's an entire computer built into the screen, the weight will remind you.

After we plugged everything in and powered up, we noticed that the screen's accuracy was off the mark in responding to our touches, which struck us as a major fault in a touch-screen based device.

However, after some considerable hunting around, we found a non-obvious, hidden application for fine tuning the screen's calibration for touch control. This wasn't loaded by default, nor was it first launched when the system booted.

If it wasn't for some digging around and running anything and everything we could find, we wouldn't have found the most needed item and would have written up the system as being faulty.

With that resolved and still scratching our heads as a little as to why a company would hide something so necessary out of the way, we moved on to using the AE1900 solely as a touch-screen device.

It does arrive with a physical keyboard and mouse but the Wind Top can boot faultlessly without them both, without any cascading ‘keyboard missing' beeping sounds, and rightly so.

The AE1900 starts up with a menu for accessing the majority of the programs installed on the system easily, all of which run from a touch of the screen.

We encountered another issue - text entry. The Windows accessibility virtual keyboard is just too small to be useful as a means of text entry, so we went off for another hunt around the Wind Top and fairly quickly came across an application called SoftStylus.

This Motorola application works well as a replacement keyboard, whilst also providing on-screen character recognition which wasn't all that good and tiresome to use.

Icons came across a little blurry on the screen which took a while to get used to, but only small icons and not with text, which makes you wonder if its just your eyesight. We assume this is down to the resistive touch screen.

There isn't a great deal of software that really shows off the Wind Ae1900. It could have really done with a few apps to highlight its usefulness. On that note we struggled to find a useful role for such a device beyond novelty value.

The tide turned one evening we spent surfing the web, sans keyboard and mouse. The Ae1900 came off rather well as a second computer in the home. General surfing doesn't need a physical keyboard; the virtual one was good enough when needed.

In Short
The MSI Wind Ae1900 could be useful as a second computer in the home. Once the touch-screen novelty wears off you can't really see the point of having a physical keyboard anymore and even resent going back to one.

There's also the possibility of a computer-cum-TV replacement: the 16:9 form-factor screen came across well for viewing films and TV programmes, plus there's the built in DVD drive which is missing in the Asus EeeTop PC. µ

The Good
Touch-screen, quiet.

The Bad
Doesn't include much touch related software.

The Ugly
Could be just a novelty rather than really useful.

Bartender's Report
8/10