Wind U115 finally available in the US

By: Pallab Jyotee Hazarika

MSI makes the Wind U115 Hybrid with both HDD and SSD available in US market.

The U115

The MSI Wind U115 Hybrid with dual hard discs in the form of HDD and SSD, which is a first, is now available in the US via the official website. It’s long been speculated to be released in the US after the much-hyped launch. There is another reason though for which this hype exists – the extraordinary battery life. The company claims a marathon 18-hours of juice out of its 9-cell battery, which is, even for a pessimist, is the most commendable performance.

Only available in Metallic gray for now at least, this 10.2-inch machine is powered by Intel's Menlow platform, and features a 10-inch screen with a 1,024 x 600 resolution. The LED backlit display helps saving energy by helping reduce the power draw. It runs on a 1.6GHz Intel Atom Z530 processor with Intel's Poulsbo US15W graphics chipset. The brain is a 1GB DD2 RAM. The storage is split between an 8GB SLC SSD and a normal 160GB hard drive, which can be easily turned off to save power.

Weighing in at around 1.3kg including the 9-cell battery, the Wind U115 also gives you the traditional netbook features, such as a 1.3-megapixel webcam, a 4-in-1 card reader and three USB ports. Connectivity is taken care of by Bluetooth 2.0 and 802.11b/g/n Wi-Fi. You bring it home with either the Windows XP Home edition.

Actually, the operating system is installed on the SSD drive, which helps save power as well as improving performance and speeding up boot times – as claimed by MSI, also as a result is the awesome battery life. How you do that? Simple – Press Fn + 10 and The HDD will be disable temporality and SCM will show as icon in the tray. Press again to enable. Yes, it is that simple – and it will enable the battery to last longer.

Update

Just recently Microsoft banned the hybrid concept, which it says is against the Operating system installation policy. It is giving a deadline till June end for all players to remove any such machines from the market. Let’s see what MSI has in mind.