Staples clearing out old MSI Winds

Yup, the MSI Wind netbook is old news - well, the U100 is at least.  It was last year's model, now replaced by the fancy U120 (though I haven't seen one in stores yet).  So Staples had to clear out the U100.  They even had the super early U100s models sitting on their shelves - and that's what I picked up; two to be exact (one for me and one for Sandy).  The last version of the U100 has a 6 cell battery and 120 gig hard drive.  But before that was a 3 cell battery model.  And before that was the 3 cell, 80 gig hhd model - that's the one I bought, for $297 plus tax - darn GST.

Stapes was selling open box models though.  I had the helpful Staples guy pull 4 from inventory so that I could have my pick.  One was a straight return - the previous buyer thought it was a digital picture frame.  That's what the Staples guy told me.  The buyer pretty much opened the box, noticed the keyboard, closed the box, and returned it to the store.  Sure enough, when I booted it up, I was greeted with the Windows welcome to setup screen.  This one I gave to Sandy.  

The rest were all used a little.  The techies at Staples tried to return them to their factory settings, but they had forgotten the drivers.  I picked the one with the least wear - this one was for me.  I bought an external burner from Memory Express the next day to install the drivers myself.  Luckily, MSI was nice enough to include the Windows restore DVD and the drivers DVD - not many companies do that nowadays.

After doing a little surfing on the net, I found out that the MSI Wind is actually a pretty good netbook and quite popular too.  So popular infact that it has followers who have set up web pages and forums just on the Wind.  Searching some more I found out that this little thing can and, have been, hacked and modded.  Sweet!  A really good purchase, I thought.  This thing is gonna keep me entertained for a while.