Building an MSI Wind Nettop

I had the pleasure of building a MSI Wind nettop barebones just recently. I purchased the barebones setup from newegg.com for $139.99-$10 rebate and I also popped in a 500GB Western Digital hard drive, 2GB of DDR2 and a Sata DVD-R/W. The total cost of this system was about $230. I had a spare usb wireless adapter laying around so I didn't have to fork over more for that feature.

The build itself was simplistic and putting it together was a matter of unscrewing a few screws and pulling the case off. The build took about 30 minutes and the install of Windows XP went smoothly. This barebones does come with a Compact Flash slot in case you want to run your operating system from a CF card. I opted for the standard SATA harddrive because I wanted the extra speed.

The machine is powered by an Intel Atom 1.6GHZ processor which is actually very speedy for just about any of your "normal" tasks. By normal I mean this thing handles just about everything I throw at it. Currently my wife is watching an HDTV xVid and it's working absolutely fine. For running office applications, web surfing and streaming torrents this thing is fantastic. I currently have it tucked away behind my 42 inch LCD and I can't hear it or see it...just the way it's supposed to be.

I'm extremely happy with my MSI Wind nettop and would recommend it as a pseudo media center to anyone looking for a cheap way to get those torrents streaming on a big screen.