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You know as soon as anyone hears that the MSI Wind Top AE2210 is a touchscreen computer, they'll have their mucky pups all over your once clear, shiny all-in-one screen. That's going to leave embarrassment if the touch functionality isn't up to much, but we're glad to say that MSI seems to have learnt from the folly of the Asus Eee Top and even the relatively useless touchscreen features of the Acer Z5763.
MSI doesn't specify the type of touch system it uses in the Wind Top AE2210. It detects activity just before you actually touch the surface, so we suspect it's an infrared bar rather than resistive or capacitive.
Generally we found it to be accurate and responsive. The supplied Wind Top software lacks design refinement, and there's no suggestion to run through the calibration process, but you're supplied with the standard Microsoft touch demos and a child-friendly touch paint package. We also happily used Media Center and other programs with just our fingertips.
The display itself does exhibit a small amount of light leakage at the top and bottom. Oddly, we felt it could have been a touch brighter, but more importantly accurate colours and good viewing angles with that high resolution help to provide an enjoyable display.
That's also backed up by the performance of the THX speakers, with genuine range from deep base through the mid range with high tones all being produced, although without much volume.
The 3D performance on the MSI Wind Top AE2210 is its most obvious weakness - don't expect to play games made in the last few years. The recent Lost Planet 2 benchmark even at a 720p resolution returned an unplayable 7fps average. The ageing 3DMark 2006 returned a score of 2654, showing it capable of playing games around the age of Half-Life 2.
We're fans of the latest Sandy Bridge Core i3 processors - for what is an entry-level processor you get a massive amount of processing power that includes Intel HyperThreading and a 3.1GHz CPU speed. This offers high speed media encoding and effortless HD playback.
