S1dd - My Other Blog..

The MSI Wind is now listed at the MSI website. The 3 cell it seems will be shipped on Jun 21. I’ll wait for the 6 cell in July before buying. Here is a link - shop.msicomputer.com. The site is still not taking orders (1:09PM Eastern).

Other retailers who have it listed are:
1. Amazon
2. RK Computers (link from MSI website
3. Low Price Joe
4. Q2 Designs

Nobody still has it in stock and most retailers who mention dates, mention 20th Jun or later. I wonder why MSI pulled this stunt, stating boldly that they will start shipping today. Also the retailers don’t know if they will get the 3 cell or the 6 cell battery versions.

Update (1:52PM Eastern): MSI has taken off the 6 Cell and Linux Winds and the 3 Cell ship date has been pushed back to Jun 27. Maybe the EEEPC 901 and 1000h will show up before the Wind?

Update (3:10PM Eastern): MSI has taken off all the Winds from it’s website now and there is no official release date any more. The msimobile.com main page still links to the press release with today as the release date. I now have my doubts that I’ll find one next month too. Crap!

Update (3:56PM Eastern): 3 Cell Ones are back and in stock (limit one per customer) - currently 56 black and 24 white in stock. Shipping Jun 27. For a product that created so much hype these low numbers are ridiculous!! I’m still waiting for the 6 Cell.

The MSI wind now has an official site and an official price of only $499 making it cheaper than the EEEPC 900!! Still no sites have it listed except Expansys UK, which is charging over $600 for it. I’m waiting for it to show up on NewEgg or Amazon so I can order it as soon as it is available.

It’s a shame the cheaper $399 linux version has no Bluetooth and a smaller 3 cell battery forcing me to buy the XP version. but well with an 80GB drive, I can probably dual boot the thing.

Update 10AM ET 06/03: MSI Wind now available at MWave but specifications do not match MSI site.
Update Noon ET 06/03: Out of Stock Already at MWave. It seems that they never had any stock to start with. At least now the specifications have been corrected. Be warned that MWave requires that you fax them an ID and your credit card front and back. This is ridiculous and very unsafe. I do not recommend buying from these folks.
Update 11AM 06/09: Amazon listed the MSI Wind on Friday. They stated a price of $549 for the XP version and had a 3 cell battery listed and were taking preorders. Now Amazon is no longer taking pre-orders and no price is mentioned.
Update 11AM 06/09: Hand Built - an unknown newcomer site has listed the MSI Wind for sale at 499 + 10$ UPS ground shipping. And many users of an MSI WInd forum I visit have placed orders there.

Sometime in the near future, I want to replace my aging Thinkpad R51 and dying Compaq Presario laptops with a new one. Ideally I would like a Thinkpad T-series with a Blu-Ray burner and HDMI out but such a beast does not exist.

The only light notebook that I can find with a blu-ray burner is the Sony FZ series, which is nearly a pound lighter than it’s competition. So I go to configure this to see what it costs and voila, I’m presented with the most amount of software that I’ve seen pre-installed with no way not to have it. Then I looked at reviews online and found that the machine itself is fantastic but out of the box it runs slow as molasses thanks to all the preinstalled software!

What it says - What it means
Microsoft® Works - Microsoft® Works SE 9.0 with 60-Day Trial Version of Microsoft® Office
Photo Standard - Corel® Paint Shop Pro® 30 day Trial
Video Standard - Click to Disc Editor ™, WinDVD
QuickBooks Simple Start - QuickBooks Simple Start - Free Edition for Windows
Norton 360™ All-In-One Security (60 Day Trial)

Also for a little bit of extra money at each option you can get even more crapware installed. Out of all the software mentioned above only WinDVD is a reasonable addition because it is required to play Blu-Ray discs. Maybe Sony can charge 5$ extra at each option not to install anything. I will gladly pay Sony 20$ more to not have to cleanup all this bullcrap later on.

Some of these things such as Norton 360 are notoriously difficult to remove and might even require that you download a removal tool from the Norton website. I’m guessing Sony makes money by forcing these down your throat and that might be the reason for the decent pricing for a great machine. But can we have the option of just paying extra please? Plus I’m pretty sure this is the stuff that Sony mentions on it’s website but there will be other stuff that is not mentioned such as trials to internet services, media players etc.

Maybe I need to consider Dell with their “limited” bloatware? But I hate the dell website. What do they care if I am a home user or a small business user? Just show me all your damned laptops. I don’t want to go to three different sections of the site to spec out the same laptop three times and get three different prices.

Lenovo has taken everything that was wrong with the Macbook Air and fixed it and come up with the new X300. All the missing ports included (Mini PCIe, 3!! USB ports, mic in, headphone out, stereo speakers vs. mono on the air, and my favorite Thinkpad thing - the trackpoint mouse, gigabit ethernet port), a dvd burner included, a higher resolution screen (1440*900 vs. 1280*800), memory expandable to 4GB, a faster processor (2GHz vs 1.8). The notebook even has built in bluetooth, wifi, options for Verizon/At&T broadband, gps, wimax. It also includes other goodies like a fingerprint reader, webcam and microphone. After all this the weight comes in just a hair over 3 pounds!

So where is the down side? The only Hard Drive option is a Solid State Drive making the price high (estimated $2500-$2800) but still lower than the Macbook Air with the SSD.

Get your own thinkpad:
Click Here

Why one should not buy anything except a thinkpad:

Finally I replaced the dying hard drive on my Thinkpad and went on to install both XP and Ubuntu. First I installed XP because I’ve had trouble installing it second before. I couldn’t use the XP that came with the Thinkpad because that was on a corrupt partition on the old HDD that was dying. So I found another XP CD and installed. It didn’t have the drivers for either the wired or the wireless ethernet so I couldn’t go online to download the rest of the drivers (video, audio, touchpad etc.)

Next I installed Ubuntu. It found drivers for everything and was working right out of the box. This new 7.10 version finally fixed all the problems I had with 6.06 (such as crappy wireless settings, no hibernation etc.) and nearly everything just worked right out of the box. Once Ubuntu was installed I managed to download all the windows drivers for the laptop. I got the wired lan working on the thinkpad. XP refused to accept that the wireless drivers were correct so I had to force it to use the drivers that I gave it. Finally the wireless was working and I started Windows Update after activating the copy of Windows.

At some point during the Windows Update, a power failure made the internet connection go away and Windows Update stopped downloading further updates and started installing all the downloaded updates, then asked me to reboot. So I reboot and now Windows will not start saying it cannot find ntoskrnl.exe. I boot in Ubuntu and look for the file. The file exists but it is of unknown size and of unknown type (other exes are all labelled as DOS/Windows executable) which means that Windows update put in a corrupt file.

Back goes in my XP CD and I select Repair this time which puts me at a command prompt. I type “dir” and I get an error telling me it cannot show me the directory. So my Windows is completely busted. I have been living without Windows on the laptop for over a year now because my previous Windows installation also died thaks to HD corruption but Ubuntu lived on and was able to atleast boot in command prompt and I could run fsck and fix hard drive errors and reboot with a gui.

The only reason I need Windows is to run Visual Studio.NET so I will give it another try, maybe I’ll just give VMware a try and install Windows in a virtual environment and do away with a separate install.

Are you thinking of getting one of the new 18X zooms? Want to know what 18X zoom is like? Here is a sample from the Fuji s800fd:

18X Zoom:

Samsung DVD Hi-Def Duo Player for just $785! at onsale.com. The price shows up as $999. Click on “Click Here for Our Lowest Price” and the price drops to $785. The player is expected to launch before Holiday season this year and is the first full featured Combo HD-DVD and Blue Ray Player.

I’m hoping the street price falls under $500 by next year. Samsung also announced a Blue-Ray Home Theater in a Box this year and they will probably announce a HTIB for the BDP-UP5000 next year too. I’ll post here if I find any good deals on any of those.