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:

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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.

This little guy, the Febot, charges your batteries, literally. Like, it literally charges Duracell (and other, lesser brands) batteries. Well, “literally” is a bit strong, as it’s only a concept, but whatever.

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Holy crap, you could drive a truck under that thing. That’s a nine cell battery for the MSI Wind netbook, which is available on Ebay’s UK site according to a post in the MsiWind.net forums. The item ships from China for a grand total of around £70 – roughly $115 in US dollars.

Owners of this gigantic lump are reporting over 6.5 hours of battery life. When I tested the six-cell MSI Wind, I was able to get a little over five hours before having to recharge so I’d almost think you could squeeze 8+ hours out of a nine-cell battery with everything tweaked to maximize power consumption.

[via Wired]

The Averatec netbook that we caught “wind” of (pun majorly intended) back in August is now shipping. It’s called the Averatec Buddy and you’ll remember that it’s actually pretty much a rebranded MSI Wind, except that the Buddy has dropped the Bluetooth connection and popped in a 160GB hard drive.

Oh, and the 10.2-inch screen features AveraBrite! Also, Averatec lists the Buddy’s weight at 1.65 pounds with its three-cell battery, even though the 3-cell Wind weighs 2.3 pounds. I’m going to assume that Averatec’s weight is incorrect, because the site also says that it’s got a 12.1-inch WXGA screen even though the product’s title lists it as the “Averatec Buddy Notebook 10.2 in” – if they’ve got a 12.1-inch MSI Wind that only weighs 1.65 pounds, I’ll buy three of them.

Averatec Buddy [ShopAveratec.com]

Wow, lotsa good deals today. J&R is selling the black MSI Wind with Windows XP for $399 after a $50 price break and $50 mail-in rebate. And – and! – it would appear that they have them in stock, too. This is the three-cell battery version, if you’re wondering. But for $399, that’s a hard deal to pass up if you’re looking for a good netbook.

The $50 mail-in rebate is good until the end of the month.

MSI Microstar WindBook U100-016US [J&R via dealnews]

The fine folks over at Fudzilla have managed to wrangle photos of the upcoming MSI Wind U120, which should be available at the end of the year. Specs appear to be very similar to the current MSI Wind U100, except that the U120 will feature a SIM-based 3.5G wireless chip, presumably to attract a more business-oriented crowd.

The netbook will still have a 10-inch screen and decent keyboard, and hard drive options are reported to be either a 120GB conventional drive or a 20- or 40-gigabyte SSD, which seems odd since we normally hear about 16GB and 32GB solid state drives. I also wouldn’t be surprised to find out that the processor would be one of the dual-core Atoms, since the U120 isn’t supposed to ship until December. Fudzilla claims it’ll cost under $600, which would be consistent with MSI’s aggressive pricing strategy.

A couple more photos after the jump…

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Sylvania had the right idea when it rebranded the 7-inch Everex Cloudbook as the Sylvania “g” netbook except for the fact that the Cloudbook never really took off. Then came the 8.9-inch Sylvania MESO, which was a kinda-sorta rebranded Amtek Elego by Digital Gadgets, a licensee of Sylvania. Huh? Now, Sylvania seems to be on the right track by rebranding the 10-inch MSI Wind as the Sylvania g MAGNI.

Price and availability aren’t known yet but we do know that it’ll have a 120GB hard drive, run Windows XP or Ubuntu Netbook Remix, and have 1GB of RAM.

[Laptop via SlashGear]

Our friends across the pond will soon have some options as far as the MSI Wind netbook is concerned. Three new versions will be available soon, although there’s no definite time frame apart from “contact a local official MSI distributor,” per MSI.

So here’s what’s coming. First, the U90X-007UK (pictured far left) will have an 8.9-inch screen instead of the standard 10-inch screen. See that black border around the LCD panel? Looks like the body and everything else is the same standard Wind, just with a smaller screen. This one will have the standard 80GB hard drive, but it’ll be running SUSE Linux and will cost only £269.

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Remember Averatec? I sure do. I’ve owned two Averatec computers. One when the company used to be Sotec and another when it used to be Averatec. Now it’s sort of called TriGem, but sometimes called Averatec. Something like that.

Anyhoo, Joanna Stern of Laptop Magazine spoke with Averatec’s marketing director and found out that Averatec and MSI are in cahoots. It turns out that Averatec will be selling what’s basically an MSI Wind under the Averatec brand name. The netbook will be similarly configured to the Wind except that Averatec is considering bumping the hard drive from 80GB to 160GB, dropping the Bluetooth (whaaaey?), and only offering it with a three-cell battery. Production will start in the coming weeks and we’ll likely see these things for sale in the middle of September for between $400 and $500.

Here’s a nice little weekend project. You can pick up a barebone MSI Wind system (not the netbook, the desktop version) from Newegg for $140. It’s one of the first desktop systems to use Intel’s power-sipping Atom processor (1.6GHz). You’ll need to add RAM (it uses laptop RAM) and a hard drive (or CF card) to this kit, and maybe even a little Wi-Fi card if you’re feeling adventurous.

The board itself has an internal Compact Flash slot that shares an IDE channel, so you could stick a big CF card in there instead of a hard drive. That’s a nice touch right there. Maybe build a Car PC or something. There’s also a mini-PCI slot if you wanted to add that Wi-Fi card I mentioned in the previous paragraph. Might as well, huh?

MSI Wind PC Intel 945GC 1 x 200Pin Intel GMA 950 Black Barebone [Newegg]

Hey, looks like Best Buy hasn’t jacked up the price of the MSI Wind!

If you’re still looking for one for under $500 and you’re okay with waiting 1-2 weeks, you may be able to grab one through Best Buy. It’s online-only, so don’t bother heading out to your local store. It’s also the three-cell battery version, too, but don’t let that dissuade you. It’s still a nice little lappie.

Q2 - MSI Wind Laptop with Intel® Atom™ Processor [BestBuy.com]

What can we learn from this MSI Wind video review from our friends in Denmark?

• It is NOT waterproof. Not really.
• It’s what everyone on the blogs — on “The Engadget” — is talking about
• We may see a $100 Atom-based laptop within ten (10!) years
• Again, the Wind is not waterproof. The OLPC has a waterproof keyboard.
• Nobody knows when we’ll see the first ARM laptops running Google Android.

Thanks to Charbax for sending this in. Enjoy!

MSI, most recently reviled by us for essentially pulling a bait-and-switch earlier this month, is perhaps hoping to regain some of the credibility it lost when it raised the price of its tiny notebook by $50 after the fact. Quick, kiss some babies!

Recognizing our corporate social responsibility, MSI Notebook is taking the initiative to launch the “Love with the Wind” global charity program. This will take the form of charity donations in Taiwan, China, Poland, Ukraine, Turkey, Russia, Vietnam, the Philippines, Indonesia, Korea and India to give poor children a chance to learn how to use computers.

Sounds good to me, charity is always nice, but considering the level of responsibility they demonstrated earlier, I’d like to take a good look at just how much of my purchase is going towards actually helping needy children. Call me cynical, but I do occasionally question corporations’ motives when they make moves like these.

If you’re not yet turned off by MSI’s recent price hikes or you have a three-cell version of the Wind already, a post over in the MSI Wind Forums details how to turn the small-ish three-cell battery into a whopping nine-cell battery.

It looks relatively easy if you’re really determined, although I’d likely not attempt anything that involved slicing the battery open with a box cutter. Finding the extra six cells to add to the standard three cells might be a bit difficult, too, as the forum poster simply says that he was able to “get a source of the same batteries that are in the Wind” but doesn’t detail how the rest of us could get our hands on those batteries.

If you’re the daring type, though, here’s a brief overview of the process.

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Oh wow. Wow. This is a really odd decision. MSI has raised the prices of its Wind notebook (see our review here) from $479 to $499 for a version with Windows XP and a three-cell battery and from $499 to $549 for the version with XP and a six-cell battery. An MSI rep told Laptop the following:

“Since the cost of the battery and materials raise (sp), we had no choice but adjust the MSRP to $499.99 with 3-cell battery and $549.99 with 6-cell.”

To make matters worse, some retailers are hiking the price of the six-cell version up as high as $599. And – AND! – if that’s not enough, apparently some pending retail orders are being canceled because MSI now wants to sell them at the higher price.

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