HP Thailand Sells $450 Linux Laptop

greyrax writes "The revolution has begun! Seems that the Thailand branch of HP is selling Linux-based laptops for $450. The government of Thailand is now talking to Dell Thailand about a similar arrangement."

Comments

Article seems a little short on details.

[Chris_Stankowitz]

What kind of laptops? How many of these were they selling (as many as people would buy or a fixed number)? Can Anyone buy one? Can I buy one over the internet? Would I want to buy one? The list goes on. Anyone have any links to know the answers to any of these questions?

Hmmmm.

[The Bungi]

$450? I somehow doubt this is a particularly excellent piece of hardware. I mean, even accounting for the "M$ tax" as it were (which is negligible when applied in bulk OEM licenses anyway) and considering that it's difficult to find a decent laptop for under $800... well, I think this is kinda fishy.

Seems right to me

[frovingslosh]

I just bought an HP notebook a few months ago (here in the U.S., where I couldn't avoid the M$ tax). Since then I've seen another HP notebook with a faster Athlon and bigger hard disk (40 gig vs. 30 gig) for the same $850 I paid. Considering that HP will build the systems with 20, 30 or 40 gig drives, will put a 14.5 inch rather than a 15 inch screen, give a choice of CPU, and will sell it with a DVD drive rather than the DVD/CDRW drive I got, it certainly makes sense that you can get a decent Linux notebook for this price, although I would expect a 40 gig version with a DVD/CDRW drive and a hot processor to certainly be more. But HP could well sell decent notebooks here at that price too if they dropped the M$ tax.

Pirated Windows???

[psxndc]

When was the last time you tried running a version of Windows on an 800MHz Celeron with only 128MB RAM? I wouldn't worry about pirates using these for XP. :-)

psxndc