MSI Wind Top AE1900 review

MSI’s Wind Top AE1900 is basically a 19in widescreen display with laptop components built into the rear.

It’s one of the most attractive PCs here, with a clear plastic strip surrounding the white screen bezel and a clear plastic stand at the back. There’s a webcam above the screen and all ports and controls are tucked away behind the screen edges.

On the left there’s a laptop-style DVD writer that pops out vertically, and below that are two USB ports and a memory card reader. The headphone and microphone ports are inconveniently located on the rear, along with two extra USB ports and a network interface. On the right are the power button and volume and brightness controls. The widescreen display is great for watching DVDs thanks to its vibrant colours, but there’s a noticeable graininess due to the touch-sensitive layer. The built-in speakers are slightly better than most laptop speakers, but aren’t very loud and lack bass.

The benefits of a touchscreen with Windows XP are questionable, but MSI has gone to the trouble of installing a program launcher with large icons that runs on startup, and there’s even a touch-aware photo viewer that lets you browse pictures by dragging them with your finger. There’s no stylus, though, and no handwriting-recognition software.

Unlike the similar Shuttle X 5000TA, the AE1900 uses a single-core Atom processor, and its performance is poor compared with standard PCs. Its overall benchmark result of 17 may be adequate for using email, web and office applications, but processor-intensive tasks such as image and video editing may run slowly. You’ll also have to be careful how many applications you run at once, since the measly 1GB of RAM will be quickly eaten up.

Although the AE1900 looks great and takes up less room than a conventional PC, £502 is a lot of money to spend on a computer with similar performance to a netbook. Draft-N wireless is useful, but there are few expansion ports and only 160GB of hard disk space. Unless you really need the touchscreen and have software to take advantage of it, we can’t recommend the AE1900.