Review: Advent 4211 notebook PC

This is the MSI Wind. Well, not exactly, but the Advent 4211 is identical in terms of hardware.

In a nutshell, MSI has sold its design to PC World, where it gets a different paint job, no case, and a one-year, rather than two-year, warranty.

By stripping out the case and warranty, the Advent 4211 is £50 cheaper than the MSI Wind's suggested retail price and £60-£95 cheaper than the price the Wind is actually selling for due to short supply.

The Advent comes with a matt black and grey finish, which doesn't look as classy as the MSI Wind's glossy white finish.

Both the Wind and Advent 4211 sport Intel's new Atom N270 processor, running at 1.6GHz with 512KB L2 cache. It has low energy requirements and produces little heat so the Advent 4211 is an exceptionally quiet laptop.

This is our first opportunity to benchmark the Atom in depth, since the Atom-based Acer Aspire One and Asus Eee PC 901 we reviewed last month didn't have Windows-compatible drivers.

It's a single core CPU with the first outing of hyperthreading since the Pentium 4. It produced a PCmark05 CPU score of 1,499 and Cinebench 9.5 scores of 135 with hyperthreading enabled and 90 without hyperthreading.

On the Pentium 4, hyperthreading boosted performance by around 10 per cent in a handful of applications, but the Atom result shows Intel has made huge strides with its virtual multithreading technology and it we're rather excited about the promised return of hyperthreading in Intel's next desktop CPU, Nehalem.

But despite the impressive hyperthreading increase, the 1.6GHz Atom is just two per cent quicker than the 900MHz Celeron M 353 in PCmark05 and 25 per cent slower in non-hyperthreaded applications like our single-CPU Cinebench test.

The other components include 1GB of DDR2 Ram, an 80GB 5,400rpm hard drive and Intel GMA 950 integrated graphics. Its 10in screen is pleasant to use, with a decent 1,024x600 resolution that only kicks up a fuss when used with programs requiring 768 horizontal lines. That said, HP's Mininote 2133 is the only small laptop with a higher resolution.

It may be worth skipping the Advent 4211 and MSI Wind altogether if you're planning on plugging it into a projector or external screen (for presentations and the like) because they simply wouldn't output some 4:3 aspect ratio resolutions, including 1,024x768.

MSI let us preview an upcoming Bios update that fixes the issue, but upgrading the Bios is an ugly affair because there's no Windows or in-built Bios tool.

Both the MSI Wind and Advent 4211 come with an eco utility installed, which limits the CPU to its speed-stepped clock of 700MHz and reduces screen brightness when running on batteries.

With the screen brightness set to full and Wifi turned off, both the MSI Wind and Advent 4211 lasted two hours 10 minutes in our reader test, which is 40 minutes less than the Eee PC 900 and around two and a half hours less than the Eee PC 901.

The cause is the small 2,200mAh battery – to propel this laptop to more acceptable battery life, MSI's extended 5,200mAh battery (available to buy end of August for £69) is an essential purchase.

We've done a lot of nitpicking on both the MSI Wind and Advent 4211 but, with the exception of battery life, both are much nicer to use than the Asus Eee PC and Acer Aspire One. The keyboard is much larger and more comfortable, in particular the impressive double-height return key.

But we can only recommend the Advent 4211 since it's cheap enough for you to buy a second battery, and decent battery life is something all Atom-based laptops deserve.

You can read a full review of the MSI Wind in the next issue of PCW (on sale 7th July)