Netbooks began as impish little things with 7-inch screens and sub-1GHz processors, and thankfully, they’ve matured without adding too much to the price and weight. The MSI Wind U100 is a good example of this trend.

Weighing in somewhere between the Eee PC 1000’s three pounds and the smaller Dell Mini 9’s 2.3, the two and a half pound Wind is a welcome addition the netbook family. The screen size is a tidy 10-inches, and its brightness is unrivalled. It’s not as sharp as your average LCD monitor, but it looks great from even the oddest viewing angles, and we were even able to have two documents open side by side with the widescreen.

What we like most about the Wind is its large keyboard. Going to within nanometers of the edge of the chassis, the keys are not only large and well-spaced, but the alignment from one row to the next feels more natural.

The Wind U100’s specs are what have become standard of late: 1.6GHz Intel Atom processor, 1GB of DDR2 RAM, built-in wireless, Bluetooth, webcam, and microphone. What separates Wind from other top netbooks are its hard drive and operating system.

Most Winds come with an 80GB hard drive, with an option to upgrade to 120GB, which might feel like infinitely more space to first-gen Eee users. The tradeoff is the type of hard drive, which is SATA. No solid state drive here, which would have pushed the cost out of netbook range, unfortunately.

With Windows XP Home installed, one might expect boot times to increase and general performance to be sluggish. We’re happy to report that is not the case. Our results were on par with larger notebooks when surfing, writing, and editing.

MSI has produced a quality netbook with quality performance. Don’t settle for less. Psst! The Linux versions are up to 100 dollars cheaper!