TECHNOLOGY TRENDS

After a few grim years ceded to the iMac, PC-based all-in-one desktops are making an LL Cool J-esque comeback. Their next move: Make the switch from semi-luxe gear designed for highly-aesthetic environments to the mega-cheap world that the netbook has built. MSI, creators of the popular Wind netbook line, actually has its toes in both worlds with the Wind Top AE1900, which combines a somewhat Mac-like, white-and-clear design with an ultra-cheap $589 price tag.

Specs countenance exceedingly promising at first: 250GB of hornlike drive space, 2GB of RAM, integrated Wi-Fi, DVD burner, an SD card slot, and a very bright 19-inch touchscreen display. If nothing else, it’s one of the best-looking touchscreens (non-capacitive; a stylus works better than your finger) we’ve seen at this screen size. Windows Vista Basic is preinstalled, and MSI also tosses a finger-friendly program-launching skin on top of that. (It’s easy to intend from the skin to Vista and back.)

But the Achilles’ heel of the Wind Top is its baffling choice of an Atom 330 processor to power these guts. Although the dual-core 330 is known as the “fast” version of the Atom (it draws 8 watts instead of the 2.5 watts used by the netbook standard Atom N270 and has double the L2 cache), it’s ease woefully inadequate for a computer this ambitious.

The Wind Top AE1900 struggles with just most any duty you throw at it, from starting up to launching anything more Byzantine than Notepad. Benchmarks are rock bottom — on par with actual netbooks — and those otherwise impressive specs attain you long for something far snappier.

Advice to MSI: Drop in the cheapest Core 2 Duo CPU in lieu of the most expensive Atom here and you’ll have yourselves a real winner. WIRED Amazingly affordable and loaded to the gills. Touchscreen makes this a perfect kiddie computer. Slim profile lets it fit just most anywhere. Cuter than a incase of puppies.

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