I’ve had an MSI Wind (with Windows XP) for about a year now. It’s my first and only netbook. Yesterday I spent seven hours on the train, but opted not to take the Wind with me – something that made me wonder whether the Wind is fit for purpose. Unfortunately, it isn’t, and here’s why:

Battery life: I’m only getting about 90 minutes, and mobile computing isn’t really mobile if you have to lug a charger around and seek out places to connect it. It seems that later U100s have double the battery capacity, but that adds size and weight.

It’s not powerful enough: Netbooks were never intended for running Flight Simulator or Matlab, and of course I don’t have anything like that installed. However, the Wind even seems too slow when doing basic things like web browsing and office applications.

The track pad is poor: I’m not a connoisseur of these things but this just doesn’t always respond the way it should.

So, what’s to be done? Well, hopefully Google’s Chrome OS might speed things up and maybe reduce power consumption. I’ll certainly try installing that when it comes out. But – and this is why Ubuntu isn’t already installed – I need a full featured word processor and presentation tool and they just don’t exist for Linux, yet …