Johannes over at German site Eee-PC.de was able to push a nine-cell MSI Wind U115 – the one with the hybrid SSD + HDD setup announced at CES this year – past the 25 hour mark using the Battery Eater notebook benchmarking test.
MSI has made official the U110 “ECO” netbook with a promised battery life of up to nine hours. Specs are pretty similar to the standard Wind line – 1.6GHz CPU, 10-inch 1024×600 display, 160GB hard drive, 1GB of RAM – except that the U110 ECO uses an Intel Atom Z530 (Menlow) platform instead of the somewhat standard N270 or N280 chip.
If you’ve always longed for a netbook but you don’t want to have to put up with all that pesky “portability”, MSI is hoping you’ll take a liking to the CS120 “Nettop” computer. It’s decked out similarly to the cornucopia of currently-available netbooks – 1.6GHz Intel Atom CPU, 1GB RAM, 160GB hard drive – but you’re not saddled to 1024×600 resolution and this guy’s got a built-in DVD-burning slot drive.
There must be a market for gaming notebooks out there somewhere, but dad gum it if I understand why. Thick, heavy, and generally inferior to desktops while costing more, they seem like the worst thing in the world. Oh well, that doesn’t mean I can’t admire them for what they are, the shaggy bison of the computer world. MSI’s latest is certainly among the shaggiest now, what with a Radeon 4850 tearing it up in their GT725.
We fawned all over it when it was revealed, corrupted it with our pawing hands at CES, and marvelled at its recently-revealed big brothers. And now the X320 and X340 have specs and release dates.
More hinkfo after the bizump.
After getting everyone worked up at CES over its X320 netbook, MSI has let slip two additional models in the X-Slim series; both actual notebooks with Centrino 2 processors, too. The 15.6-inch X600 and the 13.4-inch X340 are expected to be formally announced at CeBIT in a little over a week and MSI has already revealed that the X340 will cost under $1,000.
MSI revealed the U115 Hybrid Netbook on Monday, which uses a solid-state disk jointly with a hard-disk drive for extra storage.

Aw, there I go giving away the entire post in the title again. I should have made it something like “What’s in your city’s water supply? MSI knows! Full story on the ten o’clock newscast” or something sensational like that. Oh well.
Laptop’s got some interesting info about what we’ll see from MSI at CES, including:

Hark! Here’s a good deal on the MSI Wind. For one week only, starting today, MSI is offering a $50 mail-in rebate on the Wind with XP, 120GB hard drive, and 1GB of RAM. Buy.com has them for $299 after the rebate. That’s a good, good, good deal, so hurry.
MSI Wind U100-439US [Buy.com]

Apparently MSI has recently swapped out the Synaptics touchpad on the MSI Wind with a touchpad from Sentellic. What’s the difference, you might ask? Well, that thing you’re able to do with Synaptics touchpads where you gently stroke your finger up and down the right-hand side of the pad to scroll up and down web pages and documents isn’t available on the Sentellic models “due to legal issues,” according to Mobility Today. The Sentellic pad has tap zones instead, where tapping your finger creates up and down movement — might as well just use the keyboard’s arrow keys.
For Wind owners who long for the days of Synaptics-stroking, members at the MSIWind.net forums have outlined how to order an $8 replacement Synaptics pad from MSI’s competitor, ASUS (here’s the product page). Installation isn’t for the faint of heart, but if you’ve ever cracked open a notebook, it shouldn’t be too bad.