MSI Wind U160 review

In our tests we managed to get almost nine-and-a-half hours from a full charge. This is fantastic and easily enough for a day’s work. Longer battery life is possible by putting the laptop into Turbo Battery Mode (Fn-F10), one of the pre-set Eco modes. However, this reduced the screen brightness so far that it was practically unreadable, so we opted to set the screen to 50 per cent brightness, giving a realistic figure for the laptop in a usable mode.

There are several other Eco modes including Gaming (pointless really, considering the power of the netbook), Movie, Presentation and Office. We recommend setting the screen brightness and battery settings manually in all cases, in order to get a set up that you’re happy with.

As you’d probably expect from a modern netbook, the Wind U160 is pre-installed with Windows 7 Starter Edition, a 1.66GHz Atom N450 processor and 1GB of RAM. Scoring 16 overall, this netbook runs at a similar speed to all other 10.1in netbooks we’ve seen: it’s fast enough for internet and light office use, but you’ll want something more powerful for video editing or dealing with lots of photos. The processor has integrated Intel GMA 3150 graphics, which are incapable of playing games, but can handle Windows 7 smoothly.

We recommend that you upgrade a netbook to 2GB of RAM. Fortunately, MSI has made this simple with its Wind U160, providing an access hatch to the single memory slot. Once you’ve opened it you’ll need to replace the existing 1GB module with a 2GB one, which is both quick and easy.