« Posts tagged MSI Wind

BIOS Updates on the MSI Wind U123

June 13, 2010 / posted in "It's a Feature", Hardware, Makes Sense, Troubleshooting / No Comments

MSI Wind U123I’ve been updating the BIOS on my MSI Wind U123 religiously since I got it, hoping each time that the latest update will finally allow me to boot, well, anything other than DOS from my class 6 SDHC card (so far, no dice). Went I went to apply the latest update, though, I was greeted with a slightly different message than normal:

ERROR: BIOS has no flash information available

As it turns out, this message doesn’t actually state than the end of the world is near, or that you’ll never be able to update your BIOS. In fact, all it means is that the laptop isn’t connected to AC power and is running off the battery. Simply plug in your laptop and the update will run without issue.

Now why couldn’t they have just said that in the first place?

Short Review: Google’s Nexus One (Rogers/AT&T Version)

April 9, 2010 / posted in Android, iPhone, Short / 2 Comments

Now that I’ve had a few weeks to play around with my Nexus One, here are a few observations I’ve made:

  • I can’t live without the CyanogenMod ROM. Android 2.1 is nice, but the tweaks available in CM 5.x are too numerous to mention and offer many features that go well beyond what the N1 can do out-of-box. If you have an N1 (the TMO version, or the Rogers/AT&T one), get CyanogenMod. You’ll never go back.
  • The screen is, by far, the best I’ve seen on smart phone – it trumps my old iPhone 3G at every turn. Some people argue that the screen has a purple hue to it, but to them I ask, have you heard of Colour Temperature?
  • The last three phones I’ve had (an iPhone 3G, an HTC Dream, and an HTC Magic) have all had noticeable lag on the main screens and when load applications. The N1, both with the stock ROM (that I had left on for all of around an hour) and CyanogenMod simply scream. There’s nothing slow about this phone.
  • For all of those who say that the signal quality on the N1 is crap, please actually get one before forming an opinion. I’ve seen an increase in signal strength/quality on the N1 over the other HTC phones I’ve had, and over the iPhone 3G. Additionally, I’ve been able able to clock download speeds greater than 3Mbit/s on Rogers’ HSDPA network. Not too bad at all.
  • The camera is amazing – the fast auto-focus, bright flash, and fine-grain controls are simply amazing, and at 5 mega pixels, the picture quality is simply staggering for a smart phone.
  • My only real complaint about the N1 is battery life, but then again, I’m always complaining about that (the exception being my MSI Wind U123 with it’s 9 cell battery that gives me 8 hours of use). Under heavy usage, I have to charge the phone nightly. For that reason, I bought an extra battery with the phone, however as I have a power inverter for the car that features a USB port, I didn’t really need to get the spare.

That’s really about it for now. Overall, the N1 is an excellent phone, and I wouldn’t hesitate to recommend it anyone.

Short: MSI Wind U123 and Fedora 12 Wifi

December 5, 2009 / posted in Linux / No Comments

My MSI Wind U123 has an 802.11n wifi card that uses the Ath9k driver. Although it’s technically supported by the 2.6.31 kernel used by Fedora 12, it constantly drops it’s signal and often refuses to connect to my access point.

I’m happy to report, however, that after I manually compiled the 2.6.32 kernel and booted with it, the wireless card works perfectly!

Unfortunately, it seems the 2.6.32 kernel also breaks a few things – booting takes 3 minutes, and the machine hard locks on with a black screen if you close the lid. I’m going to try to iron out those issues, but overall I’m pleased with the results.

Edit: I re-installed Fedora 12, then updated to the 2.6.32.1 kernel using the FC13 rpm’s from http://mirror.kernel.org – works like a charm now. I still can’t close the lid unless I have the action set to ‘do nothing’, but I can deal with that.

Additional Edit (02/15/2010): I’ve enabled the Rawhide repo and set it to only include kernel* and dependencies. The 2.6.33 RC chain works perfectly.

Short: From the Search Results

November 30, 2009 / posted in Hardware / No Comments

To the person who found this blog by searching for “i cant get to my boot menu when i press f11 on my msi laptop”, fear not! I have encountered this issue myself!

On the MSI Wind, and most computers in general, if you enter Suspend or Hibernate from within your operating system, the boot menu (accessed with the F11 key) won’t be available. Instead of giving you the option, the computer will gleefully ignore the keypress and happy resume the OS session.

To avoid this from happening, make sure you are actually shutting down the system. Be sure to check your Power Options, as your physical Power Button may be assigned to Sleep, and Suspend is the default action when you close the lid on note/netbook.

MSI Wind/Fedora 12 Beta – Still Pulsing (Updated)

October 23, 2009 / posted in Beta Testing, Linux, Software, Troubleshooting / No Comments

I like bleeding-edge technology. The newer, the better, as there are usually fun little things to discover and rarely does anything bleeding-edge actually work perfectly, giving me ample opportunity to mess around with things.

Enter Fedora 12. I’ve played with the initial Alpha release, several of the Snap releases, and as of this morning, the Beta release. So far, at least as far as my MSI Wind 123 goes, they’re all unusable.

The biggest problem so far is the display – as soon as GDM kicks in, prior to the login screen loading, the screen starts to ‘pulse’. To be more specific, if you were to tap the ‘Brightness Up’ and ‘Brightness Down’ keys fairly quickly between two different levels, you’d get the same effect. This continues incessantly, and makes it impossible to use the GUI. If I boot in runlevel 3 (direct-to-console), everything is fine, so the issue is restricted to Xorg.

As far as the beta goes, there’s been a little regression. In the Alpha and Snap releases, I was able to get all the way to the desktop, despite the pulsing display. Now, with the beta, it takes just over 2 minutes just to get past the boot animation, and then it stalls before the login screen loads. Whether or not this has anything to do with the fact this is a livecd on a USB stick (made with the Fedora live-usbcreator for Windows, with persistent overlay), I’m not sure. I’ll probably download another spin (maybe the KDE version) and see if I have any more luck.

Update: Progess! On a whim, I removed rhgb from the kernel line when booting (press Tab to cancel automatic boot, and then again to edit boot options) and was actually able to get to the desktop, albeit with no improvement to the speed of things. The screen still pulses, however I did notice something interesting: while the screen pulses (briefly before the login screen appears, then it stops until you choose a user, and then it starts again), if I switch to another terminal (CTRL+ALT+F2, for example), the login name starts to fill with “^@” repeated several times, and then stops. If I then switch back to the GDM terminal (CTRL+ALT+F1), the pulsing stops.

At least that gives me something to go on.

Further Update (Dec 12, 2010): The Wind U123 works perfectly on Fedora 14 with no additional hacks/changes needed.

Fedora 11 on the MSI Wind

September 2, 2009 / posted in Linux, Software / 2 Comments

I recently picked up an MSI Wind U123, and have been doing my usual try-every-operating-system-I-can-find-and-see-what-happens tests. Along the way, I’ve tried Windows XP (was installed by MSI, lasted a few minutes before I got rid of it), Windows 7 (worked fine out-of-box, no extra drivers needed), Moblin v2 (not a big fan of the UI, but ran very well from an 8GB SDHC card), Fedora 12 (big issues with this one, but it’s only an Alpha release), and now I’m at Fedora 11.

I dumped the Live image of Fedora 11 (Gnome desktop manager) on to my SD card (the U123 supports booting from SD cards, something my old Acer AspireONE couldn’t do), and installed it in less than 10 minutes, boot times included. Almost everything works out-of-box, however the Gnome UI was horrifically huge. Most windows would fill the screen and beyond, making it impossible to see buttons, let alone click them.

The solution? Change the default DPI. To do this, login, then click the System menu, followed by Preferences and Appearance. In the resulting window, click the Fonts tab, then the Details button at the bottom. In the new window, change Resolution to 96 and hit Enter on your keyboard (as the Close button is just out-of-view). Everything should be back to normal.

In addition to this, I also changed all of the font sizes to 8, but that isn’t strictly necessary – I just like to get as much on the screen as I can.

Beyond that, everything else works perfectly, including sound, wireless, the SD card reader, and even the webcam.

Update (Dec 12, 2010): The Wind U123 works perfectly on Fedora 14 with no additional hacks/changes needed.