One of the major complaints about netbooks, especially the early ones, concerns the battery life. A three cell battery gives barely an hour and a half on the MSI wind, for example (although this can be improved by not installing Mac OS X on it).
The second wave of netbooks usually sport six-cell batteries, giving a life much closer to that of the regular-sized notebooks we use. And then there is the freak-show: nine-cellers so big in both physical dimensions and battery life that the market is distinctly specialist. Who on earth would buy one of these monstrosities? Me, of course.
After over a month of waiting, I finally got the call from the computer store this week. I ordered the nine-cell after concluding that my hackintosh was almost useless as it was. Even leaving it in sleep mode would kill the battery in a day or two, meaning that I was constantly tethered to a wall wart. And if I’m not taking it on the road, why the hell would I use this tiny cramped device instead of my spacious MacBook?
The battery was expensive, coming in at almost a third of the price
of the machine. It cost €114.84, or around $150. I could have ordered
online but I figured I’d rather order from the store in case things go
wrong. An exploding battery isn’t something that’s fun to deal with.
You do, though, get your money’s worth. Look at the size of that
thing! The guy in the store laughed when he saw it, although when the
machine booted into OS X he shut up a little. Oddly, the extra inch of
height makes the netbook easier to use, if not to slip in a bag. The
wedge-angle brings the keyboard up to a similar angle you get using a
laptop stand, and the extra air underneath means the fan spins ip less
often and further improves battery life.
And what life! The unit came 75% full and showed that it had five
hours of remaining charge. Macs are dynamic in determining how much
time you have left — it goes up and down depending on how hard you are
using the machine. But in normal use I’m getting a good six hours.
Normal use here means streaming Spotify music to an Airport Express and
reading web pages. Watching movies would shrink that time, but —
watching the number — not by much.
Talking of numbers, here are the specs. The battery is a nine-cell
model from MSI itself, named MS-N011. According to my system profiler
(and the excellent application Coconut Battery), the capacity is 6600
mAh, or rather it was. The maximum has already shrunken to 6482 mAh.
You may have noticed one other oddity — the color. After waiting a month, I wasn’t going to complain that it didn’t match, and I’m hoping that by wearing black pants and putting it on my lap, the monstrous carbuncle will disappear. That won’t help with carrying it, though. The weight isn’t bad, but the Wind is now L-shaped when closed, which doesn’t make it easy to slip into a man purse. Stlil despite these problems, I love it. I still need a 3G USB dongle to make it truly useful outside (blogging from the beach, for instance), but as a photo-shoot companion it’s a winner.
There is one final irony, though. At 3.2 pounds, it weighs almost as much as my MacBook, at 4.5 pounds.
See Also:
- Wind Nine Cell Battery Tested: Same Life As 1995 Cellphone …
- Nine Cell Netbook Batteries Showing Up in the Wild
- MSI’s Second Wind: Hybrid Drive, Low-Powered CPU
- Hybrid Wind Runs for More Than a Day on a Single Charge
- 10-Cell Netbook Battery Almost as Big as Computer Itself
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