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$298 Wal-Mart PC Has OO.org, No Crapware

Posted by kdawson on from the tell-me-again-why-dell-can't-do-this dept.

cristarol writes "Wal-Mart has begun selling a $298 PC (Everex IMPACT GC3502). It comes with Windows Vista Home Basic and OpenOffice.org 2.2, as well as a complete lack of crapware: 'Users accustomed to being bombarded with trialware offers and seeing their would-be pristine Windows desktops littered with shortcuts to AOL and other applications will likely be pleased at their absence from the GC3502.' The machine is targeted at the back-to-school market. The hardware is nothing to write home about: a 1.5GHz Via C7 with 1GB of RAM and integrated graphics, but as Ars points out, it should be more than capable of performing basic tasks." Dell sells a low-end PC through Wal-Mart for $200 more, and one assumes it is loaded with crapware. Anybody know for sure?

3 of 422 comments (clear)

  1. Don't sell the students short by Metaphorically · · Score: -1, Flamebait

    With a 250 watt power supply, a gig of RAM and only 80 GB of hard drive it's probably going to leave a lot of students disappointed. I don't know why everyone figures that just because students don't do weather simulations they can get by with just any junk hardware. The OS needs bags of RAM just to run right and OpenOffice (just like MS Office) needs ram and cpu power to do its work. Looks like another case of Walmart putting the screws to a supplier to squeeze dollars out of a product. I'm just mostly anti-walmart, not completely. I don't like Dell much either, but I'd just as soon head over there for a back-to-school special then decrapify it. More likely than anything, I'll just keep building my own.

    --
    more of the same on Twitter.
  2. Slashdot Groupthink is strange by DogDude · · Score: 0, Flamebait

    Slashdot Groupthink mandates that Microsoft is evil, yet Wal-Mart is hunky dory, especially if there's some cheap, imported junk that they have for a really great price. For all of the impact that the Slashdot Groupthink seems to think that Microsoft has, it's largely irrelevant if you were to compare them to a company like Wal-Mart.

    Slashdot Groupthink:
    Microsoft: always bad.
    Wal-Mart: paying their employees next to nothing and being a blight on local communities is just fine, as long as they sell PC's that don't come with MS software.

    I wish I lived in the fantasy world of most Slashdotters.

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    I don't respond to AC's.
  3. Re:Windows Tax Refund? by rjhubs · · Score: 0, Flamebait

    Walmart could sell a computer running linux.. except.. they actually want their customers to be able to use it.