Eee PC 1000H

Somehow we always knew it was too good to be true. Not only did we hear rumblings from our contacts at MSI two weeks ago that the WInd with the 6-cell battery might to be jacked up, but now it is being listed by e-tailers for more than its original $499 quoted price.

Update: We finally heard from an MSI rep who tells us that “Since the cost of the battery and materials raise (sp), we had no choice but adjust the MSRP to $499.99 with 3-cell battery and $549.99 with 6-cell.”

Despite the MSRP being $549, several retailers have taken it upon themselves to raise the price as high as $599. MWave.com has the MSI Wind 6-cell and so does Microtel, but the price is listed at $599 . That is $100 more than original $499 price. A quick search of three major price comparison engines found not one single e-tailer selling the 6-cell Wind for as low as $549. The best price we found was Zip Zoom Fly promising the system for $559, though it was out of stock.

Additionally, one of our readers who pre-ordered the Wind with a 6-cell battery from Buy.com for the $499 price had his order canceled by the site. The e-mail informing him that the order had been canceled read: “We were recently informed that the item listed below from order #XXX is no longer available from that supplier. Please accept our sincere apologies for this inconvenience.”

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A few weeks ago, we took the 5,400 rpm Western Digital Scorpio hard drive out of the MSI Wind and replaced it with a SanDisk SATA 5000 SSD. We hoped the boot time would be better and that applications would load more quickly, but in a day or two of anecdotal use with the SanDisk SSD, we didn’t notice any performance improvement. At the time, we noted that the SanDisk SATA 5000 is not a very fast SSD and that we regretted we had not had time to do any firm testing before we had to return our review model Wind to MSI.

This week, when our friends at DV Nation lent us a blazing-fast 64GB Samsung SATA II SSD, we couldn’t wait to install it in our Eee PC 1000H and this time run a complete battery of real-world tests to see how much a difference a high speed SSD can make in a mini-notebook.

With the easily accessible upgrade panel on the Eee PC 1000H, we were able to swap out the system’s default 5,400 rpm hard drive, a Seagate Momentus, with the Samsung SATA II in minutes. After installing a fresh copy of Windows XP Home SP2 with all the ASUS drivers and utilities, we were ready to put the system through some tests.

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According to Engadget, today MSI let customers who had pre-ordered a Wind NB know that the highly-anticipated mini-notebook’s ship date has been pushed back again, this time to July 7th. Meanwhile, our friend Brad Linder is reporting that ASUS sales reps told him the Eee PC 1000, 1000H, and 901 will ship in the U.S. on July 8th.

So, if both of these dates hold up, it looks like the first mini-notebooks with 10-inch screens and Atom CPUs will be shipping on almost the same day. Since the Eee PC 1000H and the MSI Wind NB are so similar to each other, we took both this week and put them through a four round face-off. The results were close, but decisive, so it just seems fitting that the two systems launch within 24 hours of each other.