6. Using The MSI MS-1029

The MS-1029 is a solidly built notebook PC. It seemed to me that the computer I received had traveled the world going from one reviewer to another. In fact, it's my guess that this is the same computer that was used in tests done for MobilityGuru's September 2005 article on AMD's Turion processor line.

For all its world-circling travel, the MS-1029 showed very little wear and tear. If anything took a hit it was the unit's pretty near perfect keyboard. The keys are large and easy to touch type on. Key travel is just right, though mechanical clicking is a bit too noisy for me. But what disturbed me was the sensitivity of some of the keys. For example, I could activate the Enter key by barely touching it. Sometimes I didn't even think I had touched the key. A few of the other keys exhibited similar behavior. I'm pretty sure you won't see this behavior on a newly out of the box MS-1029, but can't guarantee what might happen over time.

The mouse touchpad and buttons are well placed and work quite well. However, while I could turn off touchpad tapping in Windows XP Pro X32, this was not possible in XP X64. The MS-1029 used a special touchpad driver for XP X32. None was available for XP64 so the default Windows mouse driver was used. This driver does not support turning off tapping. Just for the record, I hate touchpad tapping. I've dragged more folders into weird places and inadvertently opened or closed windows because of this stupid "feature."

I had similar difficulties with on-screen volume and display brightness indicators. Under the 32 bit version of XP Pro, the indicators showed up when I changed volume or brightness using the Fn key and the appropriate F keys. With XP Pro X64 installed on the computer, though volume and brightness changed when I pressed the correct keys, no indicators appeared to tell me where I was in the process. This bugged me a lot, especially because I tended to turn the volume off rather than just down and had to go back and kick it up until I got what I wanted.

If you're wondering how hot it might be in Hell, stick your hand in front of the heat exhaust slot on the right side of the MS-1029. When running some benchmarks, I measured temperatures up to 110 degrees Fahrenheit on my own hand, with most of the heat coming from the Turion ML-42 processor. And if you're touchy about noise, be sure to wear headphones when watching a DVD or listening to music on the MS-1029. This is the noisiest notebook I've every worked with. While fan noise could probably be dampened somewhat, the reality is that super fast mobile computers are going to run hot at least for now and we'll have to put up with both the heat and the noise. Of course, you could install a slower 64 bit Sempron or Turion processor in the notebook to cut back on the heat and maybe on the fan noise. But where's the fun in that?