MSI Wind / Advent 4211

I have just driven a three hour round trip to the only store in the south of England which has the Advent 4211 in stock.

The Advent 4211 is the MSI Wind, only re branded and in different colors. The specs and dimensions are exactly the same.

Weighing in at just about .2 of a kilo more than the Eee and only slightly larger its still very much a mobile PC. The keyboard however is much more usable than the Eee. Having an 80gb hard drive does give the advantage of dual-boot possibilities, however you do lose some of that "no moving parts" shock proof factor or the Eee.

The Advent comes pre-installed with Windows XP, and although I'm not a fan, XP does feel snappy enough running on the Atom processor with 1Gb of RAM (and so it should!)

I have taken some pictures of the Advent / Wind along side the Eee PC 701 and a HP pavillion tx 1000 for comparison purposes.

Installing Ubuntu Linux on the Wind was fairly straight forward, however ensure you use at least 8.04.1 (the .1 being the important bit) wireless drivers and install instructions can be found here.

In terms of practicality, the Wind's 80Gb hdd and larger keyboard probably puts it in front of the Eee, however for battery life and "Geek Chique" the Eee still has it.