5. Features, Continued

Remember that the MS-1029 comes without a CPU, RAM memory and a disk drive as well as wireless LAN and Bluetooth capabilities It's up to you to pick the components you want. Installing your options is easy. You just have to remove some screws to get to the place where the component you need to install will be located. Click here for the MS-1029 installation manual.

With the MS-1029 MSI supplied a powerful Turion ML-42 CPU running at 2.4 GHz. As I noted earlier the paltry 512 MB of RAM that came with the notebook was hardly enough to test the power of XP X32 let alone XP X64, but even if the computer had a full compliment of 2 GB of RAM it still wouldn't benefit from the 64 bit addressing capability of XP X64. The 80 GB hard drive is 20 GB short of the maximum size supported by the MS-1029.

Here's a quick breakdown of the buttons, lights and connectors on the MSI MS-1029.

On the front from top to bottom, left to right: the catch to open the clamshell case, IEEE 1394/Firewire connector, mike in, headphone out, IR port just below mike and headphone jacks

On the left side from left to right: AC power in, two UBS connectors, wired LAN, modem, DVD RW drive

On the right side from left to right top to bottom: lights (battery status, num lock, caps lock, HDD access, WLAN on/off), card-reader (SD, MMC, MS), PC Card slot, heat exhaust vent, S-Video out two USB connectors, VGA connector

Inside left to right: power, activate Windows Media Player, Bluetooth on/off, first program launch button, second program launch button, WLAN on/off