Wal-Mart Lindows PCs Selling Well

andyring writes "CNN.com is reporting that sales of the $199 PCs have exceeded expectations. Although CNN terms them "full fledged, if low power," it seems customers don'd mind all that much if their computer does not run Windows and doesn't carry an Intel processor. Slashdot covered two reviews of those machines July 4."

Comments

The Via CPU is Really Slow

[Anonymous Coward]

I bought one in September to eval.

The 800 Mhz Via CPU is roughly equivalent to a 400 Mhz Celeron.

I popped in a 1.2 Ghz Celeron for $62 and it runs Much Better.

The 10 GB drive is also Very slow.

I could have built a much better machine for a little more money. Still, it isn't a bad deal.

I booted Lindows and took a quick look before blowing it away. It was really cheesy, with major pieces requiring additional purchase.

Re: Who on /. uses this hunk of junk? Me!

[x00101010x]

I bought one when my AMD K6-2 450 finally died and it's case was donated to my cats (they love old cases). Anyways, I just wanted a cheap system to turn into a simple home server. It works perfect. I've got it running RH8.0, Samba, a firewall/gateway setup using IPTables, DHCP server and I'll soon be adding some MP3 streaming so I can listen to MP3's all over the house. It has yet to dissapoint me, despite the lag when I'm on it (since I'm only actually on it 4 hours a week or so for tweaking). All in all, it's a great warm body machine (for when anything w/ a pulse will do).

Re:I may seem like a troll for saying this

[RatBastard]

Walmart sells 25% of the computer/console games sold in the US. They WILL NOT carry a game with an M rating. Period. Game publishers are faced with three choices if they choose to make a game more racy than Metroiid Prime:
1 - Make a WalMart version of the game.
2 - Alter the game to get a T reating.
3 - Tell Walmart to shove it.

id software has already tiold Walmart to shove it. They know that people will buy their games no matter what.

Most other game publishers are not in the financial position that id software is. They end up taking options 1 or 2. That XXX bike game removed all of the nudity in order to get a T rating and thus avoid the WalMart blacklist. 3DRealms sold a Walmart version of Duke Nukem 3D in order to avoid the WalMart blackout.

While I believe that retailors have the right to not carry products they do not want, I also see that WalMart has enough market pull to affect the purchasing choices that even non-WalMart shoppers have.

Re:$200 Walmart PCs with Mandrake?

[dbarclay10]

Lindows' success is the result of it's CEO's address large book really a bad for Linux because it's just an attempt to provide a *very badly designed* system that looks as closely as possible to Windows.

Just to be sure that people don't think the above post is a troll, I'd like to say that this is my observation as well. Having talked to Michael (Lindows' CEO), I know that the only thing he brings to the Linux desktop is a large rolodex, and a used-car-salesman attitude.

I also spoke to Cliff Beshers, their technical lead, and I was even less impressed. At least Michael knows what he brings to the party - we may not thing it's the right thing, but at least it's honest about it - but Cliff shouldn't have the word "technical" in his title anywhere.