MSI CR500 Notebook Review Pro’s & Con’s

Main Features:

• 15.6” 16:9 wide screen display
• Easy-to-carry lightweight design
• LED power-saving backlight technology
• HDMI (High-Definition Multimedia Interface) Output
• 802.11b/g/n Wireless LAN with Bluetooth(optional)
• MSI Exclusive ECO Engine Power Management System

Price: Just 21,000 Rupees in retail. I got it in an eBay deal at 18,499 only. This laptop belongs to MSI classic series. It’s a old style laptop, but with decent configuration. The overall design is good, the backpanel also comes with printed texture giving it a professional look. There is rubber pads on bottom to keep it in a specific height for good heat dissipation on surface and obviously for less scratches.

The 4X DVD writer is also good and is able to read scratched discs. The inbuilt wifi adapter is rated upto 802.11n, which worked up to 40meters with my 802.11g modem/router. The keypad is easy and there’s an curve in downside of each key which helps in faster typing, eliminating chances of twin keystrokes. The touchpad is larger with 3.5” pad and large buttons of left and right click. The status indicators are places below within touch-pad, making a easy eye catching notification. The status led’s are of

1. Bluetooth
2. Wi-Fi
3. Sleep mode
4. Battery
5. HDD usage
6. Num lock
7. CAPS lock
8. Scroll lock

The keypad there is also very useful. Unlike dell laptops without numeric pad, the MSI laptop came with a numeric keyboard in right side with every function of a normal keyboard as Print-screen, scroll lock, Pause/Break, etc.

This notebook has intel dualcore 2.3GHz processor with 45nm technology, which even showed it as Core2Duo in SIW. The HDD is of Hitachi 2.5” 250GB 5400RPM, giving a copy speed of 23MBPS which is good. The VRAM is 256MB from nVidia Geforce 8200m chipset, delivering 256MB allocated graphics, but it shares with system memory. I’ve tested some games as SOF,DeltaForce, etc all played smoothly.

The 2GB RAM maybe not much as today needs but works great. This part is from Transcend Information.

This notebook got an overall rating of 3.7 by Windows 7.

The sound quality is good, but it’s not much loud, and the webcam quality isn’t good.

The HD playback is more than expected. This notebook played 1080p videos without any frame drop. The display is 15.6” with 1366×768 resolution with 16:9 aspect ratio, which is more than 720p, which is good.

This notebook doesn’t creates noise of any kind of CPU fan or hdd, giving a silent experience.

The battery is 6cell one, and gives 2.5hours+ general computing. On tests the full charged battery ran nearly 3 hours with an wifi connection and internet browsing, with lowest screen brightness. Thanks to ‘The Latest LED Power-saving Backlight Technology’.

There’s HDMI port so that you can connect it to a LCD TV or projector and watch movies, or presentation. It comes with a card reader also. The LCD hinges are metal(covered with plastic), giving more strong base. Also it comes with a kensington lock port.

This notebook is energy star rated, so no worry of excessive power consumption. Coming with 2 years of international warranty and service center all across India, the warranty terms is attractive.

Review Summary:
The MSI CR500 is quite simply the cheapest 15.6-inch general notebook we’ve reviewed so far. It’s a steal at this price.

Pros

• Exceptional performance
• Amazing battery life
• Excellent durability

Cons

• Little large 15.6″ size, better portability would come if it was 14″.
• Bad webcam quality, low sound.