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Michigan To Purchase Record 130,000 Laptops
goombah99 writes "The Detroit FreePress reports that Michigan state is planning the largest single laptop purchase/lease ever, over 130,000 wireless laptops--enough for every 6th grader. And of course future purchases for each new class. The main competion is between Dell and Apple, with Apple having the edge in classroom integration experience. But price points will matter since the school districts may have to pay $25 per pupil. And the Gates foundation has a foot in the door. No word on what OS the Dell laptops would run. What would be your choice for middle school classrooms with minimal sys admin?"
Unfortunately, I tried putting Red Hat on my Dell Inspiron 8000 so many times. For starters, no out of the book support for the GeForce2 Go card (guh). Secondly, it didn't like something about the harddrive (or motherboard and harddrive) and it would corrupt the harddrive every time I shut it off.
I can't explain how frustrating it is to watch it corrupt itself every time you cycle the power. Sometimes it wouldn't do it at first, but within a week I'd be pulling my hair out.
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Free your mind.
I think the more important question is what software suite they are running. Aside from the hard core geeks, most people don't care what OS they are running (Obligatory MS Jab: Witness the high number of people who purchased Windows ME.) I think that a great idea here would be to forget the OS question, and go with an open productivity solution like open office. That would make the OS question moot because kids could use the same suite of tools to get their work done on the Linux laptop at school or on the PC Desktop at home. Also, the price is right.