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HP Sells Cheap FreeDOS PC in China

Posted by michael on from the nuts-and-bolts dept.

Johan writes "HP has started selling a Yuan 3,999 ($483) PC in China. The cool part is that it runs FreeDOS! Not sure why FreeDOS was chosen, but I suspect they expect it to be replaced with Linux or Windows by the user. By not having to pay for Windows, they are able to include better hardware. They probably didn't want the support burden of bundling the PC with a Linux distribution." And while we're on China, Cringely has some prognostication and speculation about IBM's sale of their PC division to a Chinese company.

5 of 241 comments (clear)

  1. Why is this news? by poofyhairguy82 · · Score: 4, Informative
    I don't get it. This doesn't sound like big news. right now I can buy an HP for $379. I could probably get a cheap enough monitor to make it under the $483 price. So why is this news? Because its China? Why does that matter?

    --

    Open Source Sushi

  2. Re:FreeDOS In chinese - Not going to be used by attemptedgoalie · · Score: 4, Informative

    The only reason it has FreeDOS is to keep it cheap.

    China is one of the countries with rampant software piracy. If you bundle an OS, you're not competitive.

    They are well aware that pirated Windows will be installed. They just can't put that in the press release.

    --
    My mom says I'm cool.
  3. Re:Here by maniac_inside · · Score: 2, Informative

    Being from India, and subscriber to 3 national newspapers, I can surely disagree with you. It is for me really hard to even find on most occasions anything related to Linux. It is quite possibe that they might be selling it from an underground shop, but I don't think that is how they are going to sell it. The truth is More than 95% of households in India run on (pirated) Windows.

  4. List of FreeDOS.org mirrors by Jim+Hall · · Score: 3, Informative

    Hi, I'm the coordinator for the FreeDOS Project, and webmaster for FreeDOS.org. Looks like we're getting a minor slashdotting. Thanks, guys! :-) In case the main page becomes unavailable, you can use this list of mirrors instead:

    slashdot.php or slashdot.html

    The primary mirror site is at sourceforge:

    http://freedos.sourceforge.net/

  5. It's called shared VRAM by tepples · · Score: 2, Informative

    Many integrated graphics chipsets, such as NVIDIA's Xbox chipset and Intel Extreme Graphics chipset, steal a few MB of main RAM to use as video RAM.