Slashdot Mirror
Lindows.com Hypes An Upcoming $199 PC
prostoalex writes "After having struck a deal with Walmart on $299 PC, Lindows is planning to introduce $199 PC. ExtremeTech has the story, the official message from Michael Robertson, CEO of Lindows, is posted on Lindows.com. Robertson claims that "for under 200 dollars, you'll be able to browse the Internet, check email and run a variety of software products for far less than the price of most handheld devices! A certified version of LindowsOS will come bundled with the PC"." I wonder if such a machine would fare any better than Larry Ellison's ThinkNIC.
Wow! $200USD! That'll be a great reliable system, just like the eMachine I threw in the trash last year!
Seriously, you get what you pay for.
Last I heard the courts were debating whether or not "Windows" was even trademarkable, and Microsoft just kinda backed off after that.
I convinced one of my room mates to buy a wal-mart PC with Lindos to ween himself off of Windows. It shows up and it's nearly unusable due to all the crap they did to it. They've got this active installer where they basically sell you the ability to install applications. It really really sucked. He would have been off a ton better just installing the latest SuSE.
The PC died before we could try it though. Took it back to a local wal-mart. Not sure what was wrong with the PC. It got to the point where only the fans came on. No beeps or video or anything and we didn't touch the inside of the box.
The man who trades freedom for security does not deserve nor will he ever receive either. - Benjamin Franklin
You gotta be jokin' me dude. COMPAQ 15" monitor: $69.
Large quantity wholesale pricing? I wouldn't be surprised if you get something down to $50.
Not to say we're talking GOOD stuff, but...
Sometimes it's best to just let stupid people be stupid.
Have you tried following the link *IN THE ARTICLE*? If Not: http://www.walmart.com/catalog/product.gsp?cat=395 1&dept=3944&product_id=1870914&path=0%3A3944%3A395 1%3A41937%3A86796%3A96356
*sigh*
its a direct link FROM the article.
When in doubt, parenthesize. At the very least it will let some poor schmuck bounce on the % key in vi. (Larry Wall)
It boots complettely off CD and read preferences from the SansDisk/NVRAM. It uses BlackBox as the WM, not TWM. Dependings on the size of the web page being viewed, the 64MB of RAM several times was not enough to handle the Netscape with "proper" plugins, let aless the other stuff (keep in mind there is *NO* swap space since there is no hard drive). Despite how much RAM dropped in price, they never produced an updated model to address this performance issue. And then the most damning piece of all. The AMD processor they use is marketed as being "like" an Intel 266 Mhz processor. In reality, the floating-point unit was more compariable with that of an Intel Pentium 100Mhz processor. This became an important issue in the fact that the driver for the soft-modem included in the system was very floating-point intensive. In fact, the soft-modem manufactor even wrote in their documentation *NOT* to use it with AMD or Cyrix based systems. The result was that if you ever used a ThinkNIC for dial-up (which was still VERY popular at the time ThinkNIC came out), then it became unusably sluggish. None of these performance issues where ever reasonably addressed. In the end, you could get a better performing dial-up web browser system for $50 by investing in a DreamCast and you could even take your NVRAM to someone else's DreamCast without lugging the entire thing.