HP Sells Cheap FreeDOS PC in China

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.

Comments

Uh

[Neil Blender]

Is $483US really cheap in China?

Re:Uh

[bcrowell]

Sure it's not the best quality, but if you need a computer and are poor, $99 sure beats nearly $500.
No, it's not the best quality, but it's Great Quality (that's the brand name -- geddit, huh? huh :-)

But seriously, I've bought three of the $200 Great Quality machines from Fry's, and actually the quality has been quite good. They're made in Taiwan, BTW -- I don't know if that would prevent them from being exported to PRC.

I'm sorry, but $483 doesn't even sound like a cheap price by my U.S. standards, forget about China! You can make a heck of a good high-end PC yourself for about $600 (high-end meaning a big hard disk and a pretty darn fast CPU, although maybe not the very fastest CPU or fanciest 3-d video card for gaming); producing them in quantity, they should easily be $450 to $500-ish. If anybody is still paying $1000 for a PC in this day and age, I assume it's a pretty serious server box (or maybe a very bleeding-edge gaming machine, where you pay an extra $500 for an extra 10% in performance).

It's kind of pathetic that the CNN article doesn't give any specs, doesn't provide any links, and doesn't say whether the machine comes with a monitor.

FreeDOS In chinese

[Janitha]

I am having a hard time imagining FreeDOS with the chinese character set, if thats what is used.

Is MS-DOS an alternative to Windows?

[spiritraveller]

HP's new model, part of its Pavilion series, features a central processing unit (CPU) from Advanced Micro Devices Inc. and a FreeDOS operating system, both cheaper alternatives to more popular CPUs from Intel and the Windows operating system from Microsoft.

I think the reporter has never used FreeDOS, nor knows what it is (surprise surprise).

FreeDOS is very useful, but for the vast majority of users, it's not an "alternative" to Windows. It's an alternative to MS-DOS!

Let me get it out of the way...

[Mr. Bad Example]

Sure, you can install Windows or Linux on these...but an hour later, you'll just have to reinstall.

Why is this news?

[poofyhairguy82]

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?

Here

[northcat]

Here, in India, there are already a lot of PCs sold by compaq that have freedos or caldera dos installed.

Re:FreeDOS In chinese - Not going to be used

[attemptedgoalie]

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.