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Hands-On With Averatec’s Buddy (Yup, It’s an MSI Wind)
October 16th, 2008 by Joanna Stern 
So how close is an MSI Wind clone to the real thing? Pretty damn close. Today the Averatec Buddy (N1000) was dropped at our office by the netbook stork. The Buddy is a rebranded MSI Wind and has had few changes made to its chassis and internal organs.
The Averatec has a similar glossy black lid to the Wind, but has a black matte frame around it. Under the hood, there is no noticeable difference in the look and feel of the keyboard, palm rest or screen. Check out our video below for a comparison between the two netbooks.
So why would someone get an Averatec Buddy over a MSI WInd, other than its cute name? We aren’t really sure. The Averatec Buddy is priced at $479.99, compared to the WInd which is going for $449.99 (for the 3-cell version) on Amazon.com at the moment. The Averatec does have a larger hard drive at 160GB (the Wind has a 120GB HDD) and comes with CyberLinks YouCam software and a 60-day trial of Norton AntiVirus. But the Averatec lacks Bluetooth which comes standard on the MSI Wind.
The rest of the specs remain the same: 1.6 GHz Intel Atom Processor, 1 GB of RAM, 1.3-MP webcam. Like the lower-cost Wind, the Avaratec comes with only a 3-cell battery. Unlike the Wind, there is no 6-cell version available.
Our guess is that you would choose the Averatec Buddy if you are a fan of the Averatec brand and if the Averatec happens to be available at retailers that don’t stock the MSI Wind. Or of course, if it freefalls in price.
Our Related Content
- Averatec Buddy for U.S. Confirmed Rebranded MSI Wind
- How Many MSI Wind Clones Can You Count?
- Averatec To Launch 10-Inch Buddy Netbook
From Other Sites
- MSI Wind U100 gets a Windows 7 update (just not in the US) (Liliputing)
- Alternative Netbook Operating Systems (GottaBeMobile)
- Hannspree HannsNote (MSI Wind U100 clone) coming to America (Liliputing)
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3 Responses to “Hands-On With Averatec’s Buddy (Yup, It’s an MSI Wind)”
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November 17th, 2008 at 5:10 pm
bought one and the screen resolution is worth mentioning at 1024×600 it may be unusable for many applications. At my company a lot of work and training is done for us roadwarriors via the company’s portal. Well the applications were not written for such a low resolution screen and as aresult you end up looking at webpages were not all the information is available on the Buddy screen. It’s like looking at a portion of a webpage and not having the IE scroll bars to see the rest of the page. So far I have not found a workaround for this without getting into replacing the graphics chips or display but I am looking for suggestions… Anyone else out there notice this problem with these low resolution netbooks?
January 13th, 2009 at 10:21 am
Yep, its a rebranded MSI Wind, Only I had not realized it when I picked it up out of a pile of clearance items at a local computer store. The box and computer were clearly lableled (By Averatec) as WXGA, so I had thought someone finally put a 1280×768 screen in a Netbook that had worthwhile performance. But nope, its just a WSVGA screen 1024×600.
Many retailers aren’t aware of the difference, and many websites are posting the tech specs as WXGA because that is what is listed. I have discovered that WXGA doesn’t necessarily mean 1280×768 as it did on the Toshiba Libretto U105 (The Ultraportable I had been using for the past few years)
April 3rd, 2009 at 10:38 am
I’ve run into the resolution issue before…
I started with an asus eepc 701 which was like 800×480 native with 800×600 mode scrolling – it was horrible… there’s a hacked driver to make it display 800×600 without scrolling but forget about reading text half the time… had a 16gb sdhc card to install apps and it worked well…sold it for what I paid for it.
Picked up a 6-cell msi wind on ebay, someone had already upgraded the ram to 2gb (necessary for all netbooks in my opinion, especially with an SSD to eliminate the page file) and had made it dual-boot xp and osx on a 7200rpm hard drive (another very worthy upgrade for almost any laptop, makes a big difference).
I used the wind for about 3 months at 1024×600 and it was great, almost no scrolling side to side… cs3 needed 1024×768 to install certain apps, I was able to plug in a 19″ external monitor and using the intel tray app switch the external monitor to be the primary display. my apps then installed fine and ran fine using the laptop flatscreen after the fact (although using both screens for photoshop worked out much better). I wound up doing so much graphical work that I sold the wind to my best friend who loves it and picked up a barely used $350 14″ core2 duo laptop with 4gb of ram as my primary laptop… sure it’s bigger but it works way faster and is easier to use at 1280×1024
I bought a dell mini9 last week on craigslist for $150 barely used… it’s better than both the other netbooks I’ve had… It’s the size of the eee with and 8.9″ screen putting out 1024×600…
I actually found this article because there’s a guy selling an averatec n1000 for $200 used and I wanted to see what it was all about – I might offer him $150, and I’d give it to my mother for web and email…that’s what it seems best for.