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Comment by bitwize | Hacker News Reader

I still have my MSI Wind. Great little machine. It runs Emacs and a compiler comfortably, so it's still useful. I prototyped a game on it over a series of subway trips to/from work.

One time a pretty girl at a bar saw it with its little retro Window Maker desktop, and told me I should buy Apple products because they're "more digital".

I guess netbooks are considered "retro" computing devices now, huh. Damn, I'm old.

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I recently recycled an MSI Wind U100. Battery was shot, hinges gave up years ago, keyboard was in pretty rough shape. Still booted though off a budget (at the time) 40GB Intel SSD that made it feel fast.

Still chuckle that they offered the overclocking option as if it mattered on that Atom N270 CPU.

Dragged it everywhere for a bit. It was the first laptop shaped device I could afford new as a teenager. I refuse to believe it's retro.

"More digital", love it.

Ten years ago I had a conversation with an 18 year old who's father ran a phone shop. Of course she always had the latest and greatest phone. And she mentioned her phone was "elegant".

I asked for a definition of "elegant" and without skipping a beat she returned: "Shiny. Electronic. Made in the last 6 months."

And so I learned elegance had a timespan.

My MSI Wind seemed like the perfect candidate for Alpine Linux. Alas, the GPU is so old that hardly anything but a terminal starts without crashing in Wayland.

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