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

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?

Comments

Funny

[abigsmurf]

Strange how the headline doesn't mention it comes with Windows Vista installed...

Re:Funny

[XxtraLarGe]

Strange how the headline doesn't mention it comes with Windows Vista installed... Yeah, so much for "No Crapware"...

Re:Funny

[techpawn]

It's more funny that it summary then follows it with the line it has no "crapware". Doesn't having Vista installed kind of say it already does?

Re:Funny

[UbuntuDupe]

Well, if the Linux community had the first clue about how to market Linux to the average mouthbreather, someone would have probably jumped on this opportunity and gotten them to use a Linux distro instead.

Re:Funny

[itchy92]

Well, if the Linux community had the first clue about how to market Linux to the average mouthbreather...

Clue #1: Don't call them that.

/Currently mouthbreathing
//Damn allergies

Re:Funny

[sumdumass]

It isn't a matter of marketing. It is more of a matter of what they know and what they will need to learn.

Wallmart had sold linux PCs before and found that when Grandma takes it home, her rocket scientist grandson points and clicks everything like with windows but doesn't get the same working results and then calls it junk. I have seen them in action before and it is really a site to see. There is a reason that there is a saying that goes something like "A trained professional will say everything it right so it must work, where some Novice would say everything seems to work so it must be right."

It has been my experience that you can find a lot of success in some operating systems by pressing buttons until it appears to work. I have heard techs at repair shops boil fixing things down to "you have to know what to do" or make up complicated explanations in terms a normal person wouldn't understand that boil down to baffling with bullshit. I think is code for eventually clicking the right sequence of check boxes. I have sent things out every so often when I didn't have the chance to work on it myself and honestly think some of these places don't have a clue. Don't get me wrong, there are some skilled techs out there too, I work beside quite a few of them. It is just that not every tech is skilled and I suppose this could go with any OS out there.

Re:Funny

[DragonWriter]

Well, if the Linux community had the first clue about how to market Linux to the average mouthbreather

Unfortunately, the Linux (and open source more generally) community is, as a broad generality, much better at creating functioning software (particularly the parts "behind" the UI) than marketing or, to a lesser extent, making well-polished chrome; whereas the Windows "Community" (i.e., Microsoft) is much better at marketing and making chrome than building solid software internals.

Re:Funny

[macraig]

What kind of hypocritical Slashdot shit is this, that the first post is maliciously modded-down as Troll, but then a reply that acknowledges and builds upon this "troll's" comment is then mindlessly modded-up as Funny? I'm modding it back up, and I would encourage others to do the same in the interest of evenhandedness.

Re:Funny

[weinrich]

Strange? This /. /. Rule #1: Windows sucks. /. Rule #2: Stories demonstrating that Rule #1 isn't absolute will be downplayed appropriately.

Re:Funny

[SgtChaireBourne]

Clue #1: Don't call them that.

The account you replied to is at best a troll, probably an astroturfer of some kind. This article has gotten them to log in using all their spare accounts and cache in all their mod points.

He forgets, or wants us to forget, that for years MS had an illegal deal with the OEMs to ship only MS DOS / MS Windows. That got broken by the courts, but MS was back with workarounds within short order that do the same thing but stay within the letter of the law. The grip used to extend firmly to the applications which the OEMs had pre-loaded and even to which icons were on the desktop.

The interesting thing here is that the grip on the OEMs seems to have slipped, despite everything. MS Office is one of the two profitable lines for MS. OpenOffice.org cuts the legs off of that one, especially because of the format OpenDocument, unless MS can get enough small time operators with their mouths open and shove in their proprietary format. Many people will find that they are quite happy with OpenOffice.org and that it serves their needs better than MS Office. That alone is useful as it breaks the lock MS had on mindshare and starts to lets people get back to using their computers instead of spending all their time mucking with them, trying to get them to work. .

Re:Funny

[jma05]

> I'm modding it back up

How did you mod a post and yet manage to post on this story? Doesn't Slashdot cancel your mod assignments if you post on the story?

Re:Funny

[macraig]

I can do it because it's modding the parent of the post to which I did comment, IOW the parent's parent. That's not "illegal". If I'd commented on the original first post, that would be a different matter.

Re:Funny

[itchy92]

Grrr... I just wanted to make a flippant comment for a "funny mod" and now you've engaged me...

I do not support Microsoft's business actions-- past, present, and probably future. But the last line of your post actually made me laugh; you think with an open-source platform and applications, people will spend less time "mucking" with their machines? Really? I'm not going to spout anecdotal evidence that I have to the contrary, but I think even the most rabid zealots would agree that by its very nature, OSS requires much more mucking than a closed platform.

I actually agree with the OP sentiment that if F/OSS wants even a fighting chance at gaining market share (beyond Firefox, and maybe OO.org), they need a marketing department, and a damned good one. I think that the distros and some of the applications have come a really long way in terms of user-friendliness and general aesthetic appeal, but I also think they've got a long way to go. Foremost, stop giving your software these goofy-shit names that no one will ever take seriously. Second, try something truly innovative, instead of using the guise of user-familiarity to copy what Microsoft "blatantly ripped off" of Apple, who "creative acquired" off of [etc. etc.]. Third and perhaps most important, stop demonizing everyone who doesn't wave your flag; closed software is not the Great Satan, it does not conspire to eat your babies in the night, and it doesn't hate freedom. For a movement that's all about choice, there certainly seems to be an intolerance of anyone who chooses the "wrong" choice.

/end rant
//damn these slashies are addictive

Re:Funny

[XxtraLarGe]

What kind of hypocritical Slashdot shit is this, that the first post is maliciously modded-down as Troll, but then a reply that acknowledges and builds upon this "troll's" comment is then mindlessly modded-up as Funny? I'm modding it back up, and I would encourage others to do the same in the interest of evenhandedness. I don't know what my parent poster's intent was, but I was simply making a joke. If it makes you any happier, even though I have +5 funny, I'm probably losing karma: 60% Funny, 20% Troll, 10% Redundant. C'est la vie. Years of making wisecracks and somehow my karma is still excellent. jma05 is correct though, you can't comment and mod the same thread, unless something's changed on Slashdot recently.

Re:Funny

[mdwh2]

I can do it because it's modding the parent of the post to which I did comment, IOW the parent's parent. That's not "illegal". If I'd commented on the original first post, that would be a different matter.

Has this changed? It always used to be you couldn't mod and comment in the same story at all.

Re:Funny

[macraig]

No, you're right and I was wrong. The pharmacist meddled with my LSD dosage yesterday and didn't tell me.

Re:Funny

[UbuntuDupe]

Yes, but to get people to use the Linux in preference to Windows, you need both! That's the point!

People like to tell stories about how MS persists because of FUD and monopoly tactics. In reality, the reason is that they're doing all the legwork that the Linux community doesn't want to do. Making software noticabely to the average consumer adds value. Getting hardware makers to write the necessary drivers adds value. Since the Linux community doesn't see the importance of that, they'll forever be perplexed about why Linux doesn't catch on among home users.

Wh else looked at it and thought...

[iknownuttin]

"Ooooo, I wonder what Linux distro to put on it?!"

Re:Wh else looked at it and thought...

[Kazymyr]

I didn't. I know I'd be using Slackware.

Laptop specs

[flyingfsck]

Hmm, that is my laptop in a big box.

Anyhoo, Dell also sells some PCs with a 'no trailware' option. It seems that manufacturers are seeing the light. I wonder how much the 'PC Decrapifier' project has to do with this change of heart.

Re:Laptop specs

[mr_mischief]

The Dell mailer I just got the other day says that all their PCs come with no trialware, not even the 90 Office lock-in.

What I want to know, though, is do I call Walmart for the OpenOffice source, or Everex?

One Question

[Eightyford]

Why not buy used? Wouldn't a used computer be a better deal?

Re:One Question

[morgan_greywolf]

Why not buy used? Wouldn't a used computer be a better deal?

Probably. For $298, it doesn't even include a monitor.

Heck, I just built a dual-core Athlon 64 x2 3800+ with 1GB of RAM, a 250GB SATA HDD, in an aluminum "gamer's" case with a side window and lighted fans and an nVidia GeForce PCI Express graphics card for just a little more than that $298 with parts purchased via Pricewatch-participating stores. (it would have been less without the fancy case/power supply, even.)

Re:One Question

[Drew McKinney]

I've never understood why people don't buy used desktops. The likelihood of hardware failure is relatively low considering the price, perhaps moreso because the machine has been thoroughly user tested.

But if you live in an area where it is difficult to shop for a used PC, or you don't have time/resources, or the knowledge to do so, this would be a very attractive alternative.

I have to say, I'm well impressed with what WalMart is offering here. They asked themselves "Should we put Vista on instead of Ubuntu? Yes, lower barrier of entry. Should we put MS Office on and bump the price another $100? F*** it, let's give them OO.org which is functionally very close." As well, who doesn't have an old monitor sitting around collecting dust?

I'm excited to see if more people purchase this machine in undergrad/highschool get so used to OO.org they ask for it when they reach the professional world. Here's to hoping!

Re:One Question

[UbuntuDupe]

Yeah, and why doesn't everyone cook their own food, since it's cheaper? And why doesn't everyone build their own house, since it's cheaper? And why doesn't everyone buy a used car, since it's cheaper? And why doesn't everyone use fluorescent lighting, since it's cheaper?

And why does anyone bother trying to whack computer geeks with a clue stick, since it's cheaper not to?

Re:One Question

[Eightyford]

Yeah, and why doesn't everyone cook their own food, since it's cheaper? And why doesn't everyone build their own house, since it's cheaper? And why doesn't everyone buy a used car, since it's cheaper? And why doesn't everyone use fluorescent lighting, since it's cheaper? And why does anyone bother trying to whack computer geeks with a clue stick, since it's cheaper not to?

Cheaper is not the same as a better deal.

Re:One Question

[UbuntuDupe]

Yes, the problem with your post was that you don't seem to understand what a "better deal" means to the average consumer -- who is not like you.

Re:One Question

[RAMMS EIN]

``Yeah, and why doesn't everyone cook their own food, since it's cheaper? And why doesn't everyone build their own house, since it's cheaper?''

These may actually not be cheaper. It depends on how much your own time is worth. Buying a used computer doesn't have to cost you extra time, whereas preparing your own food or building your own house certainly does cost time.

Also, I do cook my own food, because it's cheaper. And because it's better.

``And why doesn't everyone buy a used car, since it's cheaper?''

Again, it might not be cheaper, because of maintenance costs. However, I think the main reason is that cars are status symbols. A second-hand status symbol isn't worth that much...

``And why doesn't everyone use fluorescent lighting, since it's cheaper?''

That one, I don't have an answer to. Perhaps it is because fluorescent lamps have a higher initial cost than incandescent lamps?

I do use fluorescent lighting. Because it saves the environment. It's also cheaper, but I would do it even if it were (not too much) more expensive. And now we're full circle, because the exact same applies to me using VIA hardware, too. :-)

Re:One Question

[Rob T Firefly]

Very true. I wonder what the support package is like for this. Support alone is what has me referring non-geek friends to low-end new PC dealers rather than building them one myself from whatever parts Newegg is having a clearance on. They need the sort of help that a new PC comes with, and more to the point they need someone who isn't me to call at 2am saying "My internets are broken!"

Re:One Question

[Donniedarkness]

It MIGHT be a better deal, but it's been my experience that people generally don't know what their computers are worth (at least where I live). I seen machines in the paper all the time that are 5 years old and have prices of $500 or more. I frequently see things along the lines of:

"For Sale: Used computer. 2001 model. Cost $1100, will sell for $600. Taken good care of."

Any shops around here will try to cheat you out on both new and used computers. It's really sad when someone asks me where they should get a computer and I tell them to go to Staples (most folks here are also wary about buying online...even from Dell's website).

Re:One Question

[sumdumass]

Do you want the answers in order? Well, not enough time and skill could answer all of your questions.

As for the fluorescent lighting, I have found them to not perform as well as incandescent lights. the aren't as bright as they should be when first turning them on, temperature effects their performance, Try getting one to even come on in an outside fixture in a 20 degree typical norther winter weather. And even when the ones to work decent, it is only for a short time. With an normal light, it goes dim over time but is relatively usable until it blows. With fluorescent, I find that after a year or so, your waiting 10 minutes for it to get bright.

Now, I'm sure you might have some good reasons why you wouldn't buy a used computer. But the stuff you listed aren't really related to it for most people. I wouldn't buy used for most my needs because I need reliability. And on the same note, I tend to build everything myself for the same reasons. Not everyone can do that so just like buying a used computer, it might not be an option. None the less, it doesn't mean it isn't a good suggestion.

Re:One Question

[harrkev]

I do use fluorescent lighting. Because it saves the environment. It's also cheaper, but I would do it even if it were (not too much) more expensive. And now we're full circle, because the exact same applies to me using VIA hardware, too. :-)

Yup. If you break one, mercury vapor is good for the environment.

Point is, just because you THINK something is better does not automatically make it so. There are trade-offs with almost everything (including Via hardware).

Re:One Question

[Corporate Troll]

Alternatively, watch the dumpsters... There are gems to be found in there. Usually spyware infected and thrown away by the user because it's "become too slow". No, I'm not kidding, I have personally found such gems. It's up to the level that I don't even take machines below AMD Athlon and P-IV. I used to have "must have an USB port" as criteria for taking the machine with me, but I'd need a whole warehouse to store those computers.

Re:One Question

[Donniedarkness]

No kidding. I know people who get rid of machines with processors > 2.5 ghz, just because they're too bogged down with spyware or (I'm also not joking) "running out of space" (Does anyone else here know people who download everything they can find? Game demos, movies, music, tv shows).... which could be easily solved by adding another hard drive, or clearing up useless items (television shows, demos, and movies in particular).

Re:One Question

[Corporate Troll]

Actually, with the release of Vista, I predicted golden times for us dumpster divers. I've been a bit disappointed, because it stays at the same level as before the release of Vista.

As for your comment: yes, I personally know a kid that has a P-IV 2.6GHz/1Gig RAM and he *needed* absolutely to have a Core 2 Duo. That said, he does play computer games.... I guess.... Probably, if he didn't know me, it would end up in the dumpster. I'll refurbish it for his mom or so.... Actually, his mom has a P-III 550MHz/512Meg RAM that I saved from the dumpster.

Re:One Question

[jcgf]

``And why doesn't everyone use fluorescent lighting, since it's cheaper?''

That one, I don't have an answer to. Perhaps it is because fluorescent lamps have a higher initial cost than incandescent lamps?

the cheap fluorescent bulbs produce a lot of RFI. I'm a Ham and found that they often would wipe out HF and sometimes even make the AM broadcast band noisy. I picked up some more expensive 6500K daylight bulbs and that took care of the problem.

Re:One Question

[toddestan]

He should go dumpster diving. Sure, there's no support, but if it doesn't work you can return it to where it came from. Around here, it's not uncommon to come accross high end PIII systems in the dumpsters now. Enough to do pretty much anything you want but games.

Re:One Question

[Carewolf]

I have bought pleanty of flourescent light bulbs for exactly that reason, but they sit in a box in the closet, because the light they produce is crappy. I might put them in a garage if I one day own one, but they are getting no where near my living room or bed room, until the light quality improves (actually I use two with natural light filters, they are weak, but excelent for plants).

Re:One Question

[indifferent children]

I've never understood why people don't buy used desktops.

Used computers are rarely a good deal. Somebody who paid $700 for a desktop 3 years ago doesn't want to believe that they can't get $200, selling it used. Meanwhile, you can get a brand-new machine with better specs for $300.

Also, non-gamers probably hold onto their machines for at least 3 years. At that point, the power-supply is almost due to fail, and the harddrive isn't far behind.

Re:One Question

[tehcyder]

(I'm also not joking) "running out of space" (Does anyone else here know people who download everything they can find? Game demos, movies, music, tv shows)...

Right, like no slashdot reader has ever filled up a hard drive with pr0n.

Re:One Question

[jonadab]

> > And why doesn't everyone use fluorescent lighting, since it's cheaper?
> That one, I don't have an answer to.

Three reasons I can think of off the top of my head:

First, the up-front cost is what most people use to judge the economy of any given option, not the maintenance and operational costs. It's more obvious and more easily quantifiable, so it's what people go by, mostly. (This is also why inkjet printers are so popular.)

Second, fluorescent lighting, while admittedly more efficient than incandescent, is inferior in certain other ways. It flickers. It doesn't work well in humid weather, sometimes refusing to come on at all. Until quite recently, the bulbs were physically larger, harder to install, and more break-prone. (The new compact ones largely eliminate this concern, and significantly mitigate the previous one as well, but it takes time for people to catch on to such changes.) Breaking the bulbs is more worrisome, due to the mercury. Oh, yeah, and fluorescent bulbs (all gas discharge lamps, actually) produce only limited frequencies of light, rather than a full spectrum, so colors don't look as good under them. That last one is a real killer for a lot of people.

Finally, schools and hospitals and similar institutions have been using fluorescent lighting for decades, so a lot of people psychologically associate it with those environments. Incandescent light feels more comforting and residental.

"Eco-friendly" computer

[InvisblePinkUnicorn]

I noticed that the manufacturer's product manager threw in the word "eco-friendly" to describe the computer. Did they really have efficiency in mind when they developed the computer, or is this just part of the recent trend (a la "no carbs/trans fats") to label anything and everything as being good for the environment?

I guess a computer that has little or nothing to it also doesn't use much power either. But then, my Game Boy is more eco-friendly.

Re:"Eco-friendly" computer

[abigsmurf]

Via systems are designed to be efficient and I don't believe there's much of a price difference between them and celerons. It's possible they did want a low power PC although Via do some very integrated systems so they could've chose them so they'd spend less time and effort on assembly

Re:"Eco-friendly" computer

[dcskier]

I'm sure that was from the marketing dept, just like how you pointed out everything is now lo carb/no trans fat and my personal favorite Xtreme.

It is interesting though that somebody hasn't actually created a computer and widely marketed it as a Green PC. I'm not talked about taking a low powered machine (like this one) and just slapping a eco-friendly sticker on the side because it's a side effect of the system but actually engineering a chipset, power supply, driver, etc around being as energy efficient as possible and the marketing it based off of that fact. Yes google is working on this front with power supplies and power consumption is always important in servers, but for the common home computer user we haven't seen anything widely promoted as a green machine from any of the major manufactures. Just surprising that somebody (esp Apple) isn't all over this.

Re:"Eco-friendly" computer

[jorenko]

I can't speak to the rest of the hardware, but the CPU is at least. Indeed, the C7 is rated at 20W, whereas your average laptop Intel or AMD chips is around 35W nowadays, and most desktop CPUs at 65W or more.

I do suspect that you're partially right, however; had this computer been released two years ago with the same specs, they probably would have left "eco-friendly" off of the features list. That doesn't mean it's not true, though.

Re:"Eco-friendly" computer

[RAMMS EIN]

Seeing that it is based around a VIA C7, it probably is very power-efficient. The C7 itself is claimed to have 2W average power consumption (with a maximum of 20W). The rest of the system is probably all integrated on a small motherboard, making that very power-efficient, too. Of course, the moving parts and the monitor will still use as much power as they do in any other system, but this machine could easily consume over 100 W less than is typical nowadays.

Re:"Eco-friendly" computer

[UbuntuDupe]

Didn't you get the memo? In modern terminology, "eco-friendly" means being wasteful in the most efficient way possible.

Driving a Hummer once per year --> terrorist.
Driving a Prius 100 miles each weekend to bounce between parties --> eco-friendly.

Lighting up a tiny studio apartment with incandescent bulbs --> terrorist.
Lighting up a mansion full of empty rooms with CFLs --> eco-friendly.

Running non-eco-friendly computer 8 hrs per day --> terrorist.
Running eco-friendly computer non-stop --> eco-friendly.

Suggesting alternate method to contain global warming that requires little effort from most people --> terrorist.
Requiring everyone to adhere to a set of rules banning devices deemed inefficient --> eco-friendly.

Glad I could clear that up.

Re:"Eco-friendly" computer

[vigmeister]

Actually, there are standard that are helping to improve the situation. The concern is to actually find out what kinds of markings mean anything. For starters, google for EPEAT. Dell/Hp and other manufacturers have some eco-friendly products listed there. Most are Bronze/Silver, but some have epeat gold ratings. This'd be a good guideline for buying 'eco-friendly' PC. Of course, the standards aren't perfect, but it's better than the marketing dept. saying 'eco-friendly'

Cheers!
--
Vig

Re:"Eco-friendly" computer

[freeweed]

Coming up with a bunch of non-sensical arguments that practically none of the environmental movement has ever made --> strawman.

Posting something that makes it seem like you're "thinking outside of the box", when you're really just attacking arguments no one made --> karma.

Re:"Eco-friendly" computer

[Red Flayer]

Glad I could clear that up.

You mean, glad you could obfuscate things with straw men and false dichotomies?

Yes, there are supposed environmentalists who are hypocritical in their actions. That does not mean that, externialities removed, they make the decision that increases their impact.

If someone is going to own a mansion regardless, isn't it better to light it with CFLs? Yes. Even if you live in a small apartment, isn't it better to use CFLs than incandescents (ignoring the heavy metals issue)? Yes.

Regardless of distances driven, is it environmentall better to drive a Prius than a Hummer? Yes. You mistakenly assume that the Hummer driver only drives it once a year (WTF!? If so, they are even worse due to the footprint of producing that Hummer for the utility provided -- remeber that environmental impact needs to be measured against utility provided).

In short, your arguments are vacuous.

Re:"Eco-friendly" computer

[operagost]

You forgot:

• Taking a road-trip in a small SUV that gets 20 MPG --> terrorist.
• Flying in a private jet to an eco-maniac convention to rail against GWB, talk radio hosts, conservatives, and "global warming deniers" --> eco friendly.

Re:"Eco-friendly" computer

[UbuntuDupe]

You mean, glad you could obfuscate things with straw men and false dichotomies? Really? No one's ever criticized me for steadfastly lighting a small apartment with incandescents, while themselves having a bigger house with CFLs? You sure you want to go with that one?

Yes, there are supposed environmentalists who are hypocritical in their actions. Hypocrisy isn't what bothers me here. What bothers me is policies that impose huge inconveniences for little benefit, instead of policies with greater benefit and less inconvenience, advocated because of ignorance of economics.

That does not mean that, externialities removed, they make the decision that increases their impact. Not that it matters, but compared to me, they're probably worse, despite the fact that I don't consciously try to reduce my impact. The median American environmentalist probably:

-Uses more electricity than me
-Takes up more living space than me
-Heats their home for most of winter
-Has a greater presence among parkland and wildlife, and
-Burns more gasoline

If someone is going to own a mansion regardless, ... Even if you live in a small apartment ... Regardless of distances driven, ... Yes, but what you neglect is that the decisions to use more living space, or to drive more also have impacts on the environment. You should be concerned is with someone's net total impact, not whether they do this or that wasteful activity efficiently, and the penalty should be proportional to that total impact, rather than dependent on whether it hits a minefield of bans.

There is already such a policy: it's called a carbon tax. The "problem" of course, is that it allows people to pick the least inconvenient method, or simply pay for a pollution sink. Since it's easy to adapt to, it's DOA.

Why do you take someone's "need" to live in a mansion or drive X miles at face value, but not my need to use incandescents? Because when it comes to justifying control over other people, any arrow is good enough for your quiver.

You mistakenly assume that the Hummer driver only drives it once a year No, I correctly assume that most environmentalists' preferred policies would impose a greater penalty on someone who drove a Hummer once per year (since it would probably be banned), than on someone who unnecessarily drove a prius 100 miles per week, despite the formers lesser environmental impact.

Re:"Eco-friendly" computer

[Jeremi]

It seems there are two common responses to our planet's increasing environmental problems:

1. Try to figure out ways to solve (or at least minimize) those problems, and try to implement the necessary changes as best you can
2. Do nothing, then rationalize your lack of effort by attempting to discredit those who are trying at every opportunity

I would suggest that if the environment is going to be saved from utter degradation by humans, it will be the people in the former group who will save it. The people in the latter group aren't doing anyone any good at all, they are only salving their own unsettled consciences by pretending that "really" nobody else is any better than they are.

So yes, you can always find some outlying example of an environmentalist doing something environmentally friendly, and then say that because of that, the environmental movement is a fraud and trying to save the environment is a waste of time. But that doesn't make it so; it only makes you an asshole.

Re:"Eco-friendly" computer

[voraistos]

HOWTO : get an eco-friendly, cheap, crapware free computer: Do not buy a computer. You are reading this page, right ? then your current graphics card and processor will handle the rendering of this page just as well tomorrow. If your computer cannot render this page anymore, obviously, you have been playing with your bios settings, again, and you fucked up big time. Buy the same computer for $20 on ebay. It is called recycling, you know what the performances are - or are not - and what was supported yesterday can only have better support tomorrow. in the case you bought this second hand computer, remove the windows sticker. Burn it. It is not eco friendly, but just like weed, it makes you feel good, and when you feel good, you think about doing eco-friendly stuff. If you didnt buy the second hand computer on ebay and you get crapware, then you didnt have to install it nor opened mail from "hot girl in $YOURTOWN" in the first place you moron. PS: there are a crapware mass destruction tools everywhere. On your favorite distro's install CD, for example. Or, if you like violence, keep a hammer on the table right next to the mouse. If you prefer subtility AND wantto destroy the crapware forever, you can also use magnets :)

Re:"Eco-friendly" computer

[turing_m]

"No, I correctly assume that most environmentalists' preferred policies would impose a greater penalty on someone who drove a Hummer once per year (since it would probably be banned), than on someone who unnecessarily drove a prius 100 miles per week, despite the formers lesser environmental impact."

Or you could just crank the gas tax. I'm sure many environmentalists would be happy with that option too.

Just as big a problem with Hummers is the lethal effect of their huge and unecessary mass in a collision with a smaller car. "Cars" of that height also cause unnecessary acceleration and braking of other cars in moderate to heavy traffic.

Re:"Eco-friendly" computer

[toddestan]

I believe what he is using something called hyperbole.

If it stops them from getting hooked on WOW...

[jeffmeden]

The computer needs to do web browsing, email, and word processing. The occasional song or pic shared with friends is to be expected too. However, as long as the hardware is shitty enough to prevent the owner from becoming hooked on WOW, Eve, or any other time-vacuum, then it will probably be the best $500 the parents DIDNT spend to get their kid a better computer. And with all that free time, they just might do their homework! For the education market, this product gets an A+ from me.

Re:If it stops them from getting hooked on WOW...

[Corporate Troll]

Mod parent insightful...

Re:If it stops them from getting hooked on WOW...

[Anonymous Coward]

Still good enough hardware for older games or ones lacking shiny graphics, among them some of the greatest timesinks ever, like roquelikes and MUDs.

Re:If it stops them from getting hooked on WOW...

[Metaphorically]

This is the exact logic I disagree with. Web browsing, email and word processing are easy to say but they all take substantial amounts of ram and cpu power. Then throw in the essential virus/malware scanner and firewall and you'll burn that one gig of ram in no time.

Look at the features of a modern web browser and it's no surprise that it sucks up 100+ MB of ram. Same goes for a word processor that's doing full-time spell checking and reformatting large documents. Then there's the OS updates. When an update is made it's not made for last year's bottom-of-the-barrel hardware like this pc, that code is written to target today's average cpu. So patches to the OS are made to run on hardware that's faster than what yours was the day it was new.

Now consider that students go to school for a reason (I'm thinking college/university here). They have specific applications they need to run for some classes. In engineering I had to do PSpice and Matlab and whatnot. People in social work and other fields have stats programs they run. I'm sure accountants, geologists and every other field have their specific apps. These aren't tweaked to run on low-end hardware.

Finally there's the distance courses. They often include video, audio and copious PDF files. Flash player, Windows Media Player and Adobe Acrobat Reader are all getting fatter with each release.

I've actually convinced myself that this computer is worse for students than I thought in the first place.

Re:If it stops them from getting hooked on WOW...

[Anonymous Coward]

Man, this makes me feel old, but when I was in college, probably 25% of the students had computers. Those without them did things just as destructive or addictive as WoW like binge drinking and (12-20 hour sessions of) AD&D. You don't need a computer to get distracted and blow off college.

Re:If it stops them from getting hooked on WOW...

[CastrTroy]

When I was in university residence (1999-200), my roommate convinced his parents to get him a $4000 on the assumption that he couldn't play games on it (he was quite a game nut) when all along he had intentions of running games on it. Anyway, we ended up playing a lot of Quake 2 and NFS2, not because we couldn't get Quake 3, or NFS 4, but because there was a lot of people in residence who couldn't run those games. It was more fun to have an 8 player game of Quake 2, then to spend the time to find 2 other people to play Quake 3 with. So, while the kids probably won't be able to play the latest and greatest games on that computer, they can waste plenty of time playing older games, that don't even require half the power that computer has.

Re:If it stops them from getting hooked on WOW...

[goldspider]

I concur 100%. If I'm going to buy my kid a new PC (big "if"), it will have ZERO bells and whistles. If he/she wants to play games on it, the upgrade costs are coming out of their pocket. As a parent who will likely be paying for their college, I don't feel obliged to provide for their entertainment.

In fact, while I'm thinking of it, this PC might be a good buy for my parents who badlu need to upgrade their old workhorse. Those specs will run XP just fine!

Re:If it stops them from getting hooked on WOW...

[markov_chain]

I think you're being slightly pessimistic here.

All this stuff runs just fine even on 512M of RAM. I use one such machine for work, which includes most of the stuff you listed (word processing, web browsing, matlab, lots of compiling, lots of PDF, image editing, etc.), and it runs just fine even with dual monitors.

Let's not even go into the "uphill both ways" stories of what computing power we used in college to do these exact same things.

I think the GP is right, the kids will whine because they can't play games. Been there, done that :)

Re:If it stops them from getting hooked on WOW...

[jamesh]

As a parent who will likely be paying for their college, I don't feel obliged to provide for their entertainment.

Don't worry... I'm sure your child will find something else to do at college... I know I did

*cough* became a father half way through third year *cough*

Re:If it stops them from getting hooked on WOW...

[UbuntuDupe]

Yeah, I know what you mean. For example, when I download a large file in Firefox, it basically freezes FF for something like 30 seconds before downloading. With IE it peacefully downloads in the background without slowing the browser.

Re:If it stops them from getting hooked on WOW...

[AncientPC]

Because web browsing/e-mail do use plenty of RAM and occasionally high CPU load doesn't mean it requires lots of RAM or a powerful CPU.

I have set up plenty of PCs/laptops for SMB, student organizations, friends, and family in the 500Mhz-1.5Ghz CPU and 1GB RAM range. What causes computer slowdown more than anything else is crapware from users, which unfortunately cannot be replaced or upgraded. (I've started converting them towards Ubuntu when appropriate.)

On my university most of the computers in on campus labs are similarly spec'ed, including Computer Science and Engineering departments. Assuming undergraduate level, coding and CAD don't require powerful computers.

/ me is using a P3 1.3Ghz laptop / 512MB RAM for daily coding and note-taking.

Re:If it stops them from getting hooked on WOW...

[sumdumass]

I dunno about this. My sister completed her bachelors degree in both business and science with an old Tashiba 200 mhz Pentuim pro laptop on 192 megs of ram I lent her and never got back. When she needed more drive space then the 2 gig (1 gig compressed that came with it), I gave her an 80 gig network drive that also had a USB connection.

Of course this was about three or four years ago, she ran a combo of windows 98 and Knoppix and was paying for school and everything herself while working. I think she stretched the degrees out an extra year by going to school part time. I don't think things have changed all that much have they? Maybe the "paying for it herself while working" made her depend less on the computer and more on traditional things. I know one of her classes, she need to use the Unix shells in the computer lab at school, the knoppix didn't work good enough or something. I offered to send her a better desktop but she said the laptop was good enough.

Is vista and everything needed to keep it safe that bad? I haven't installed it although I am planning to do so soon. I just want to get another SATA card from 3ware and a couple drives so I can give it it's own drive.

Re:If it stops them from getting hooked on WOW...

[Red Flayer]

1 Gig ought to be enough for anyone. Heh.

Seriously, though, if the choice is between a student having this $300 computer, and a student having no computer, which do you think is better?

Not every parent can afford to spend $1000 or even $500.

I'm sure accountants, geologists and every other field have their specific apps. These aren't tweaked to run on low-end hardware.

Yes they are. Any app designed for business is tweaked to run on a variety of systems, programs are designed to run on systems that were state-of-the-art more than five years prior. The business upgrade cycle used to be around three years, but now it's getting larger every day -- and businesses tend not to buy top-of-the-line systems anyway.

Back to educational use -- very few disciplines of study require apps that really use a lot of cycles. And when they do, typically those apps are run on university computers, not students' PCs. Those apps are also typically used for high-level research, not basic undergrad stuff.

Re:If it stops them from getting hooked on WOW...

[Tihstae]

*cough* became a father half way through third year *cough* You don't really belong here reading /. do you?

Re:If it stops them from getting hooked on WOW...

[mulvane]

How is this modded FUNNY? Gotta be the WOW slaves actually taking a break to read slashdot. This is an honest account of what computers have come to for the younger generation. Productivity on a computer capable of gaming isn't even its 2nd purpose. Lucky if its the 5th or 6th purpose for having one. Get a student a computer with just enough power to do SCHOOL WORK, and they may just use it for that.

Re:If it stops them from getting hooked on WOW...

[AncientPC]

Apparently you've already proved Einstein's Spooky Action theory.

Re:If it stops them from getting hooked on WOW...

[arodland]

Uh no. No they don't. I used to do my web browsing and email on a 486DX4 with 12MB of RAM. That would be with Netscape 4.7 and Balsa. Did word processing on a similar machine with 16MB of RAM and WP5.2. Everything was reasonably snappy. Now I understand software bloat and all, but if you're going to tell me that the bare minimum requirement to get these things done has increased over 80-fold, you're just an asshole :)

Re:If it stops them from getting hooked on WOW...

[TheMeuge]

Clear your download manager list. Processing the names of all those pr0n clips slows the download initiation down.

P.S. I may be kidding about the pr0n, but not about the root cause of the slowdown.

Re:If it stops them from getting hooked on WOW...

[Metaphorically]

Yup, this machine was probably built for XP. And from your statement I'm guessing that your parents aren't doing anything on a computer that needs to be done. I know if my mom can't get her email or watch a flash video one day she just decides to do something else for a while.

A student, otoh, has work that needs to be done. And in a timely manner. And often using whatever wierd software the school/prof says they will. Things like "CPU" and "RAM" aren't bells or whistles. They're the basic needs for getting work done. The fact that a better CPU or more RAM also makes it possible to play a game doesn't mean that games are all a better machine is good for.

If you're that worried about your kids playing a game on the PC you buy them then you'd better remove all the other bells and whistles too... like Flash... and the web browser... and Java and the OS... because they can be used for entertainment too.

Re:If it stops them from getting hooked on WOW...

[Calinous]

You can ran geologic applications on supercomputers - but remember that the computer a geologist takes to work must survive to very harsh conditions (dust, heat, cold, maybe rain), and as such is a low configuration built for the task. So, their applications really must run on low-grade computers.

Re:If it stops them from getting hooked on WOW...

[UbuntuDupe]

Wow, someone actually made a design decision that resulted in any user not actively maintaining a subsystem gets significant slowdown?

Re:If it stops them from getting hooked on WOW...

[Jaysu]

As a student, I give you my advice...

I bough my computer 4 years ago, as I entered college. My computer has actually done a good job "keeping up with the times." I survived a few CS classes and several EE classes that required some cpu-intensive applications. All of this goes to say, that if you want your student to have a computer that will still be productive years from now, go ahead and invest the extra few dollars now. It will save at least some frustration on those late-night Matlab labs or coding sessions.

Believe me, I've seen people who settled for the cheap computer (...my roomate), and I think he has spent more $ on Advil in the long run then he would have spent for the upgrade.

Re:If it stops them from getting hooked on WOW...

[Lord Ender]

And with all that free time, they just might do their homework!

Actually, if they don't get hooked on youtube and WoW, the kids may spend that free time getting hooked on drugs and promiscuous sex. And that damn hip-hop music. Get off my lawn!

Re:If it stops them from getting hooked on WOW...

[goldspider]

A 1.5 GHz CPU and a gig of RAM are plenty for running XP and running your standard everyday software. And perhaps things have changed since I was in college (not TOO long ago) but I don't recall needing any special software that required a 3+GHz CPU.

And I wouldn't be particularly worried about my kid getting sucked into Flash games and whatnot; they're hardly the timesinks that MMOG's are.

Re:If it stops them from getting hooked on WOW...

[Corporate Troll]

became a father half way through third year

And you're somehow proud of doing that? Using no protection while you didn't really have the financial means to found a family. Okay, so if this was planned, I retract my critisism....

I do not say that you may not be proud of your offspring, though. You should, even if they were "accidents".

Re:If it stops them from getting hooked on WOW...

[orclevegam]

And I wouldn't be particularly worried about my kid getting sucked into Flash games and whatnot; they're hardly the timesinks that MMOG's are.

They aren't as nice to look at, and there are fewer of them, but there are flash and Java based MMOGs out there. Also, any of the larger universities likely have a LAN gaming center somewhere on campus where students can buy time to play most of the current games for console and PC for a few bucks an hour. The LAN gaming center and arcade at UCF were about the only 2 things I really liked about that campus.

As for the system specs, if you pick up a semi-decent graphics card for ~$150 you can probably run WoW just fine, even on older hardware. On the other hand, my workstation at work when I have all my IDEs up, Outlook (I hate it, but it's mandated), Pidgin (what they don't know won't hurt them, we're supposed to use this terrible client IBM makes that crashes constantly), and Firefox with a dozen tabs open, I easily eat between 1 and 2 gigs of RAM. And that's on XP, can't imagine what putting Vista on here would do to my productivity. The point is, for most games, the graphics card is the most critical piece of the system, get something decent enough, and you can scrap by with bare minimum hardware for everything else and still have a workable experience. For most serious apps, like having a few office applications, multimedia utilities, or any of the heavy weight IDEs running, and your CPU and RAM become critical. My home gaming system has half the processing power and RAM as my office work station, but a graphics card that's ten times as powerful, and both systems perform at about the same level at their given tasks.

Although, as someone else pointed out, if you don't have any specific software mandated, you can run Linux, with LaTeX, vi (or emacs you heretics), Firefox, Pidgin, and gcc or some such, and get by with very minimal hardware all around. Although if you're going to run the latest version of gnome, or KDE with all the bells and whistles and 3D desktops you'll need something beefier.

Re:If it stops them from getting hooked on WOW...

[jandrese]

My only concern is that a manufacturer selling a $300 PC probably cut corners all over the place. Cheap power supply, cheap case, cheap connectors on the motherboard, etc... The $300 PC could easily cost a lot more when it breaks after a year and you have to replace half of the machine.

Re:If it stops them from getting hooked on WOW...

[Dare nMc]

Back to educational use

and it is about educational use. If the student is planning to run matlab, etc and is competent to install and run those packages, then they should either already be computer literate enough to upgrade memory and or CPU. Or it would be wise to give them the learning opportunity.

After all, a $36 memory upgrade, and a $50 CPU update are still cheaper than even the student version of any program that would likely need it.

Re:If it stops them from getting hooked on WOW...

[westlake]

Seriously, though, if the choice is between a student having this $300 computer, and a student having no computer, which do you think is better? Not every parent can afford to spend $1000 or even $500.

The $250 desktop computer without monitor or printer. No Internet service. No budgeting for consumables. This isn't a PC for the middle class or the working poor. It is a toy for the Slashdot Geek.

The real story here is the death - or still-birth - of OEM Linux in American big-box retail.

Re:If it stops them from getting hooked on WOW...

[AuMatar]

Funny, I got through college not that long ago on a 350 MHZ P2 with a measly 256 MB of RAM and a 12 GB hard drive, that at the time was the biggest on the market and cost $600. I could have easily gotten by on half of that, if I wasn't gaming. Run a normal OS that doesn't require half the memory ever produced, and anyone not gaming could easily get by on a 10 year old PC. If they want to run some hardcore engineering apps- well matlab ran just fine on the PC I mentioned above, with a virus scanner running and winamp in the background. PCs these days really just have gobs of unused power.

Re:If it stops them from getting hooked on WOW...

[Metaphorically]

WP5.2 for DOS ran great on a 386 with a couple megs of RAM. That doesn't meet the needs or expectations of a student today. I fail to see how the increasing hardware demands of software makes me an asshole.

Re:If it stops them from getting hooked on WOW...

[Red Flayer]

The $250 desktop computer without monitor or printer.

2nd-hand monitors are very easy to come by. Printers are a dime a dozen, just watch out for cartridge costs. Even Walmart has rebate promotions to make the effective printer cost zero.

The real story here is the death - or still-birth - of OEM Linux in American big-box retail.

No, that's the real story for a different article. This one has little to do with OEM Linux, it's about a low-price PC with OO instead of MSO. This isn't even about big-box retail, Walmart is a general retailer. And this thread in particular is about whether a low-specced PCis enough for students in today's computing environment.

Re:If it stops them from getting hooked on WOW...

[Impy the Impiuos Imp]

EverQuest should run fine on it, too, even if WoW doesn't.

Re:If it stops them from getting hooked on WOW...

[Skuld-Chan]

From the sales brochure:

Hit the latest high-performance games with stunning 3D visuals-from simple to spectacular, there's a game for every age and ability, on your PC or online.

Thing uses VIA chipset - it should be able to play games just fine. From my own experience btw - WoW runs just fine on crap hardware (Intel Intergrated GFX for instance) unless your into battlegrounds.

Re:If it stops them from getting hooked on WOW...

[chaoticgeek]

When or where did you go to college. I'm currently enrolled and about 75% of the stuff students do on their computers is not related to school. Many people have low end laptops or desktops with a 1 GHz processor, maybe 512 of ram, and a 40 to 80 GB hard drive. It works just fine and those that need more powerful machines are the people who are into computers and know what they are doing. Plus with the whole "I need an iPod" they don't keep much music on their computers and what is left is some pirated movies if they are smart enough or pictures. It is mostly split between facebook/myspace and IM conversations. All those specialty applications cost too much for most students to buy to use on their computers that they just head to a lab to use it for the half hour that they need the software for the week or every other day.

I never had matlab but we had 4 or 5 labs, 30 to 50 computers in each, with matlab and any other software we may need and everyone got along just fine.

Re:If it stops them from getting hooked on WOW...

[westlake]

just watch out for cartridge costs

Precisely.

When there is nothing in the budget for the $25 print cartridge and nothing in the budget for dial-up or DSL then the $250 PC is a fifty-pound paperweight.

this thread is about whether a low-specced PC is enough for students in today's computing environment.

The Geek has stereotypes of the non-technical end user - kid or adult - that make this argument futile.

In the end, "enough" is defined by what people are willing to pay for -- the brand-name laptop with midline specs or better.

The market is middle class and the middle class is profoundly wary of the bottom-feeders. Most have been burned at least once. Walmart has tried this price-point before and nothing ever comes of it.

This one has little to do with OEM Linux, it's about a low-price PC with OO instead of MSO. This isn't even about big-box retail, Walmart is a general retailer.

There is no bigger box in retail than Walmart.

Re:If it stops them from getting hooked on WOW...

[turing_m]

All that means is that they'll discover abandonware. Though perhaps by the time your kids are in college, commodity PCs will be more than capable of playing WoW.

Re:If it stops them from getting hooked on WOW...

[petermgreen]

If you can live in an environment that is isolated software wise and don't mind the lack of modern features then sure you can keep running old hardware/software combinations.

OTOH if you buy a new machine running windows it will probablly be running vista. There are ways to downgrade of course but in most cases that is either expensive or legally dubious unless you already have XP Pro and your vista OEM license is a buisness edition. If you want to use the modern internet without extreme pain you will need a modern web browser and a modern virus scanner wouldn't go amiss either. If you want to exchange documents without a lot of pain you need to be running the same or at least similar versions of office (which in turn implies similar versions of windows). This software uses up a lot of rescources unless you take a lot of effort to trim it down (and sometimes even when you do).

Re:If it stops them from getting hooked on WOW...

[turing_m]

"When there is nothing in the budget for the $25 print cartridge and nothing in the budget for dial-up or DSL then the $250 PC is a fifty-pound paperweight."

Meh. If all they use that PC for is to prepare documents, a $10 flash drive means they can print anything they want for $.25 a page at numerous local places, or for nothing at school.

And in the 10 years or so before I had internet, I still somehow found a use for a computer.

Re:If it stops them from getting hooked on WOW...

[Hucko]

Education has MS Office to write emails....

Has VIA improved?

[athloi]

Last time I checked, their CPUs were erratic, their chipsets flaky and their reputation mainly derived from making cash register and micro-PC machines that were for one-app use and no manic power user antics. Has VIA improved?

Re:Has VIA improved?

[427_ci_505]

Only VIA product I've used (that I know of) is the K8T800 chipset in the compyAMD64 that I'm using now. It's been at work since 2003 and never given me any problems. So chipset wise, they seem good enough.

Re:Has VIA improved?

[JustNiz]

I bought a core2 cpu when they first came out, expecting the imminent release of nvidia 680i chipset and 8800 GPU.
Well both nvidia was delayed by about 6 months so I bought a cheap ASRock motherboard just as a stop-gap. It used a VIA chipset. I also thought the same about VIA then, but I don't now.
The motherboard didn't have blazing performance but it was incredibly stable. It had hardware raid, both SATA and PATA, supports both DDR 1 and 2 memory, and is still the only socket 775 motherboard that has both AGP and PCI-E GPU slots. Furthermore it cost $55.
I thought it was an excellent product.

Re:Has VIA improved?

[RAMMS EIN]

I can tell you that the motherboard I have, a VIA SP8000E, is junk. Too many clock speed switches and the thing freezes. Need to disable the vertical retrace interrupt, or it will freeze eventually when running X (sounds like a race condition). This is the third SP8000E I have; the other two died in their 8th or 9th month (still within warranty, otherwise I would have gotten a different motherboard by now). I think some of the never motherboards with Nehemiah CPUs are essentially the same, so I would expect those to be flaky, as well.

On the other hand, I have nothing but good things to say about the VE5000 that I had before.

As for the hardware in this Wal-Mart PC, I don't have any experience with that. It might be rock solid or it might be incredibly flaky. Time will tell.

Re:Has VIA improved?

[ceeam]

I dunno. VIA usually were ok. There mainly-AMD chipsets were no speed-demons (when it mattered) but they were OK. And sure as hell we always can haz one more CPU manufacturer in addition to Intel and AMD. Performance does not even matter as long as prices (which seems to be the case) are low indeed.

Re:Has VIA improved?

[SCHecklerX]

I've had the opposite experience. VIA chipsets / processors are very well supported in Linux, and there are a lot of multi-ethernet-port motherboards based on their stuff that kick ass as branch office linux-based firewall/vpn endpoints vs. shelling out money for checkpoint/nokia licenses.

Re:Has VIA improved?

[bocin]

I foolishly bought an Everex laptop. If I took all the software installed off it would still be crapware.

Re:Has VIA improved?

[yppiz]

I have a Via C7-M machine - an OQO 02 - running Vista. It's as stable as an Intel or AMD machine. So, yes, they have their act together.

Re:Has VIA improved?

[zlogic]

VIA were the guys who made the first DDR-compatible Pentium 4 chipset, forcing Intel to do the same. Otherwise we'd still be using insanely expensive Rambus memory.

Re:Has VIA improved?

[springbox]

I've had a lot of motherboards with VIA chipsets and they have all worked wonderfully. Linux support for them is also pretty good.

Re:Has VIA improved?

[BigCheese]

WalMart puts a lot of price pressure on their suppliers. Even if the same box purchased elsewhere is acceptable I would expect the ones sold through WalMart to be lower quality.

Re:Has VIA improved?

[Carewolf]

Since nVidia joined the chipset game, and started making chipsets with more flaws than VIA, VIA has been considered pretty good. And with the basic training from the old VIA days, both Linux and Windows has become very adapt at supporting chipsets that break every bus-standard in the system.

Comparison

[eldavojohn]

Dell sells a low-end PC through Wal-Mart for $200 more, and one assumes it is loaded with crapware. Anybody know for sure? Well, from the product page of the $500 "Dell Dimension E521 Desktop PC w/ AMD Athlon 64 X2 Dual-Core Processor":

• # Microsoft Windows Vista Home Premium Edition
• # NVIDIA GeForce 6150 integrated graphics
• # Dell USB keyboard and USB 2-button mouse
• # Integrated 10/100 Ethernet
• # Integrated 7.1-channel audio
• # 56k PCI data/fax modem
• # Microsoft Works 8.5
• # Adobe Acrobat Reader 7.0
• # Roxio Creator Basic
• # McAfee Security 30-day trial
• # Earthlink application software
• # Windows Vista PC-Restore
• # 1-year limited warranty and at-home service

Having experienced all the above software (with the exception of Earthlink application software whatever that is), I'm going to say that yes, it is loaded with crapware. Scariest one on that list would probably be the earthlink application software because that's the most generic name for a product I can ever think of.

The other differences between these two machines is they have comparable memory, DVD burner & GPU, the Dell's hard drive & CPU are a lot better. The ArsTechnica article mentions upgrades at a price, you could probably get the IMPACT up to the Dell range and get it close which is probably pretty important for the average consumer who doesn't want to deal with the ordeal of reinstalling Windows just to get a clean slate.

Re:Comparison

[MrDoh1]

Just in case you really don't know, Earthlink is a cheap dial-up ISP so I'm sure it's software to get you online with them, similar to AOL crapware.

Re:Comparison

[fotbr]

Earthlink software is of the same quality and usefulness as AOL's was

Re:Comparison

[Bert64]

Do you need ISP-supplied software?
Does the OS not come with everything necessary already?

Re:Don't sell the students short

[The_Fire_Horse]

I know that Walmart are a bunch of pricks, but seriously a 1G PC with 80G HD is more than enough for a students LEARNING needs.
Sure, if you include MP3's, porn, FPS games and bittorrents it may not run so well, but still $289 isnt a bad price for that.

Re:Don't sell the students short

[Ant P.]

I wish they sold stuff like this elsewhere. I'd have no problem paying £300 for one, it'd make a great router/whatever with the Via chip in it.

Re:Don't sell the students short

[TheWoozle]

"Just any junk hardware"? I'll spare you the long list of systems I've worked on, but please allow me to ask you to get off my lawn.

I've done statistical analysis on a Zenith Data Systems 8088 system and written games for a Commodore 64, so please don't refer to anything with an 80 GB hard drive and 1 GB of RAM as "junk hardware". I know junk hardware, and that, sir, is no TRS-80.

The fact that the OS needs 1 GB of memory to function is what's wrong with the world! Seesh, kids these days...

Minimal crapware..

[tji]

It's not totally crapware free. From the Specs: Norton Internet Security(TM) 2007 (90-day subscription included)

They could have chosen a free AV package, like they chose a free office suite (or even a free operating system). But, they went with the try-now buy-later package.

Re:Minimal crapware..

[sootman]

What would be even more amazing would be if it came with an actual Microsoft Vista install DVD. Anyone know if it comes with one? Or is it just a restore DVD, or something else (like a *gack* restore partition)? TFA didn't say and the Everex site itself seems to be down.

Also: anyone know how a 1.5GHz VIA C7 performs? Comparable to a 1 GHz PIII at least?

Re:Minimal crapware..

[l3v1]

It's not totally crapware free. From the Specs: Norton Internet Security(TM) 2007 (90-day subscription included)

They could have chosen a free AV package, like they chose a free office suite

Even more, with the Norton stuff installed that 1.5ghz via cpu will feel like a 800mhz one and with constant hdd scratching it will feel like it swaps all the time. There are dozens of - even free - av sw that are at least as good and need much less resources - which is point to consider given there's only 1gb of memory and vista on it. I just made a 750mhz duron machine usable again last week by replacing that norton 2k7 stuff, they just wondered how could that be...
 

Re:Minimal crapware..

[edremy]

They could have chosen a free AV package,

Are you sure about that? While I obviously don't know any details of the discussions between "freeware" AV companies and PC makers, I doubt that AVG would let the company bulk-install even the freeware AVG version. They would probably treat installing it on 100k computers as a corporate install, and AVG charges for those.

Norton is only willing to pay to put their version on since it's crippled and they expect people to pay up when the trial ends. It's a lot different when giving someone a full featured, uncrippled version- it costs AVG money since they have to pay for the bandwidth & servers for updates if nothing else.

Re:Minimal crapware..

[pla]

Also: anyone know how a 1.5GHz VIA C7 performs? Comparable to a 1 GHz PIII at least?

Yeah, the Epia and JetWay microATX/miniITX boards use that line, and I have one with that exact chip.

I'd say it compares favorably with the PIII, clock-for-clock. It works pretty well for a general purpose PC. You can use all your normal "productivity" apps no problem, it can handle audio just fine, some video (they usually have hardware MPEG2 and now even MPEG4 decoders, though I don't know what the exact setup mentioned has). Even some older gaming, but don't expect any modern FPSs to run well, if at all.

As a VERY nice feature, they suck very little power. For a system with one of these, using the on-board video, with one HDD, you can realistically expect to see under 40W peak consumption. And of course, that shows in the cooling needs as well - A single low-RPM CPU fan works fine, you won't even hear it outside the case (of course, for a dirt-cheap WallyWorld PC, you can probably count on getting a POS power supply with a nice loud 80mm fan in it).

Re:Minimal crapware..

[pugdk]

I agree, I looked at the specs myself and immediately singled out:

Additional Software
  CyberLink PowerDVD Suite
  Norton Internet Security(TM) 2007 (90-day subscription included)

Norton Internet "Security". In my opinion you would have to search hard for worse crap ware.

Re:Don't sell the students short

[Silver Sloth]

More likely than anything, I'll just keep building my own. Ok, you can build your own. So can I. However there are many, may people out there who either can't and/or don't want to so supplying an entry level PC at an entry level price is good marketing. There's plenty there to run a browser and OO which will cover most homework assignments. Maybe, when the users find that it won't run the latest games software they'll be forced to upgrade and start the IT learning experience.

Re:Slashdot Groupthink is strange

[CaffeineAddict2001]

Uhm. Not one person on slashdot has said anything positive about wal-mart.

You are just the kind of dog that likes to pee inside the house I guess.

Nice home Linux server box

[tji]

At $300, it's hard to beat.

The VIA C7 is a nice low-power CPU, with enough kick for most server tasks. At only 20 Watts power, it's well below any of the Intel/AMD options.

Too bad there isn't a version without the Windows tax.. this box at $250 would be even better.

Re:Nice home Linux server box

[Anonymous Coward]

google for "get the microsoft tax back"?

Re:Nice home Linux server box

[Anonymous Coward]

The C7 has some cool features like one cycle frequency switching and an encryption engine. As much as I use ssh, the crypto engine would be very helpful. Check it out here before you dis it.

http://www.via.com.tw/en/products/processors/c7/

I don't work for VIA and I posted anon b/c I forgot my username and I'm too lazy to go through the recovery process.

-Randall

Re:Nice home Linux server box

[tji]

Good link. The C7 @ 1.5 GHz looks like it's even lower power -- 12Watts, vs 20Watts @ 2GHz.

Anyone have links to real world benchmark information (not performance per Watt, raw application performance)?
This would make a nice Linux server.. my only hesitation is raw power for the few CPU intensive tasks my server performs. For example, MythTV commercial flagging. With my 1.6GHz Athlon64, it does commflagging quite well. I'm wondering if going to a C7 would slow that down a lot.

Also, this box could possibly be an interesting Myth frontend. The integrated GPU has an MPEG2 accelerator function, which (when everything is working well) can make decoding HD video very low overhead. But, there are several issues that would probably get in the way

- Driver support. The OpenChrome project is a bit iffy.. They may not support this new chipset, and may not have full functionality if they do.
- XvMC VLD support - If it does work, the XvMC API is not always reliable.
- HD support -- depending on the chipset, it may or may not support HD resolutions. Many VIA GPUs are limited to 1024x1024, which makes them fairly useless.

Re:Nice home Linux server box

[Chandon Seldon]

MadTux.org has been selling a very similar box with no OS for a while:
http://store.madtux.org/product_info.php?cPath=57& products_id=229

Re:Nice home Linux server box

[drinkypoo]

At $300, it's hard to beat.

As a daily price, that's not entirely untrue. But overall it's crap - you can get something far more credible at least one week out of every month. Look in the sunday paper... at least the one I read (San Francisco Chronicle) has ads for $300 PCs at least once a month. Sometimes you can get a 15" TFT included for that price! And usually it's something like dell, compusa, and wal-mart all with deals. Credible laptops are running $500...

Sure, they're crap'd up, but that stuff is removable. Slashdotters should have no trouble. I recently got in a PC for my dad with that problem, I went through and cleaned all of it off and now it's just fine. Incidentally, it's a refurb HP with a pretty fast P4 and it was like $330 shipped from geeks.com (my favorite spot for refurb PCs.)

Re:Nice home Linux server box

[Darundal]

If by similar, you mean with a 13.3 gig hard drive, no optical drive, and 256 megs of ram...although then again, the box from mad tux is only $139.

Re:Nice home Linux server box

[mr_mischief]

The MadTux machine also has optional upgrades right there in the cart. Easy to miss, but they're there. With a gig and an 80-gig hard drive, you're looking at $292. Add a dual-layer 16x burner and you're looking at another $38, and still no OS.

It isn't Wal-Mart, so getting this close to the same price is pretty darn good. Besides, it's MadTux, and people who shop there can generally download their OS for free (even directly from MadTux, although the Ubuntu 7.04 isn't workign very well today).

Re:Nice home Linux server box

[tji]

Yes, but half the attraction on that machine is the low power CPU. The C7 is very low power, 12Watts max according to the VIA www site, probably much less on average for normal usage and with Linux power savings features. A "pretty fast P4" could easily take 10x the power, which adds up for a server machine running 24x7.

Another benefit of the low power is low heat, which translates into low noise. A system using only 12W could run with a passive heat sink (no loud fan). Another plus for a server.

As others have mentioned, there are cheaper places to buy C7's (although, after adding RAM and disk, they aren't much cheaper). But, for server usage, low power is important -- P4's are the opposite of low power.

Re:Nice home Linux server box

[dbradley]

I have 3 Jetway J7F2 boards here which are VIA C7 1.5GHz CPU with VIA northbridges and southbridges etc running Linux.

After several weeks of stability problems (machines locking up randomly even when idle) I'm giving up completely on VIA-based motherboards due to the reliability issues.

Re:Don't sell the students short

[pthor1231]

I'm running Vista Business With OO.org right now with 512 megs of ram. That is by no means "bags" and I have yet to really see a performance issue. Granted I do have a dual core processor, that doesn't really help with the ram issue. So just because you think as a student you are entitled to a 1000+ dollar computer so you can pirate tons of shit on the universities "phat pipes" doesn't make this computer not a very decent value for its price.

Re:Don't sell the students short

[UbuntuDupe]

Exactly. Why do Linux users have such a hard time understanding that MOST CONSUMERS ARE NOT LIKE THEM ?

Some of us do :)

[everphilski]

just because students don't do weather simulations

My wife got her Masters in Meteorology and did this. I'm an Aerospace Engineer and basically consumed 100% of my computers' resources (dual core AMD x5200) for a month and a half doing runs for my thesis. (and yes, the simulation was multi-threaded)

I agree with your premise. While this machine will work for people just interested in social networking, anything beyond that will leave the user lacking.

Re:Some of us do :)

[sprack666]

You represent the minority though. For 99% of the population it does everything they need.

Re:Don't sell the students short

[mwvdlee]

I wholeheartedly agree!

Apart from the fact that, if you're going with Windows on this kind of hardware, a version prior to Vista would've been smarter, everything should suffice for it's intended purpose.

Problem is that Microsoft probably offers OEM's Vista for near free but charges a premium for XP, the system would have probably been more expensive if it included an older version of Windows.

Re:Don't sell the students short

[Corporate Troll]

Exactly... With a bit luck it might even be very low noise. I'd buy one...

Wow, a 1.5 VIA

[edwardpickman]

Does it come with a hamster to run the power supply or are those extra?

Inflation of specs for student tasks

[Anonymous Coward]

What's up with the inflation of specs you need to have to write reports and do other school stuff ? When I was in high school ("Gymnasium" as we call it over here in Europe), I wrote all papers and reports the first year using Amstrad CPC 6128, Arnor Protext on ROM and a 9-pin printer. Later I used a 486 and WP 5.1 (Now with Graphics..). Today I have a 900 MhZ AMD K6, 512 Mb memory, and still I can use InDesign, Word 2003 and Excel to do 100s of pages of technical manuals, without any slowdown at all. Yes, I do not play games, but do you have to ? I would be happy to have a 1,5 GHz with 1G or RAM. So stop saying that it's "Nothing to write home about". My guess is, the people that don't play games never use even a fraction of it's powers.

Re:Inflation of specs for student tasks

[DocSavage64109]

Yeah, I really believe you have a 900MHz K6. (I know, you meant an athlon or duron as even K6-2s maxed out around 500MHz or so)

Other than that, I agree -- most non-gamers would be fine with it.

Re:Inflation of specs for student tasks

[Tim C]

Isn't the answer obvious?

How would stores shift the mid- and high-end PCs, given that most people don't play modern 3D games, if they didn't inflate the specs required to perform more common tasks?

I've even seen stores recommending at least a mid-end PC if you want to surf the web. Presumably the low-end ones aren't powerful enough to run a web browser...

Re:Inflation of specs for student tasks

[Colin Smith]

When I was in high school ("Gymnasium" as we call it over here in Europe) In Austria or Germany. In Scotland, England and Wales it's "Secondary or High School". In France, "Lycée". etc etc.

Re:Inflation of specs for student tasks

[Lord Ender]

With the proliferation of AJAX, many websites are all-but-unusable on a machine slower than 2GHz. I see no sign of this trend reversing.

A computer as slow as yours would make me less productive. Every time I have to stare at a screen waiting for the javascript processor in my web browser to FINALLY produce a renderable web page, my concentration is interrupted and my train-of-though is derailed.

Maximum productivity can only be achieved if computers respond to your input at the speed of thought. Slow computers just don't do that with AJAX apps.

Re:Inflation of specs for student tasks

[Corporate Troll]

I wrote all papers and reports the first year using Amstrad CPC 6128, Arnor Protext on ROM and a 9-pin printer. Later I used a 486 and WP 5.1 (Now with Graphics..).

Yes so did I, even though for me it was a 286, but we had a HP Deskjet 500. In my class I was the only one handing in homework/papers typed. Everyone else just handed in a handwritten version... That was perfectly well accepted by the teachers.

These days, I heard that it must be typed... I think that is insanity.

Re:Inflation of specs for student tasks

[Corporate Troll]

It is used in The Netherlands too. It also is occasionally used in Flanders (="Dutch part of Belgium"). For some reason, I just assumed the guy was Dutch ;-) I'm also guilty of generalizing "Europe" and actually disregarding anything except the Benelux, Germany and France... which are the countries I'm most familiar with...

Re:Inflation of specs for student tasks

[penguin_dance]

I remember when I wrote on stone...STONE tablets I tell you. Electronic notebooks--bah! These dog gone kids don't know what it's like to haul a stone tablet through the snow....

Re:Inflation of specs for student tasks

[massysett]

With the proliferation of AJAX, many websites are all-but-unusable on a machine slower than 2GHz. I see no sign of this trend reversing

Got any links? That way I can be sure to avoid these sites. I have never seen a website slow down *at all* on my 2-yr-old laptop, which has a 1.6GHz Pentium M and 512 MB of RAM, some of which goes to the video. I later bought a desktop and put 1GB of RAM in it. I now think that was a mistake (but only a $50 one) and that it would have run just fine with half the RAM. free -m always shows hundreds of megabytes of free RAM, even with two months of uptime and the alleged Firefox memory leaks. It's ridiculous to need 2GHz to view a webpage.

Wait, are you running Windows? I use Linux, though even I would be surprised if Windows is so awful that you need 2 GHz to view a webpage.

Re:Inflation of specs for student tasks

[Joe Snipe]

When I was in high school ("Gymnasium" as we call it over here in Europe),

Wierd! What do you call the gym?

Re:Inflation of specs for student tasks

[saintlupus]

It also is occasionally used in Flanders (="Dutch part of Belgium").

Stupid sexy Flanders.

--saint

Re:Inflation of specs for student tasks

[Chandon Seldon]

I distinctly remember having a K6-III 700mhz. I'm not sure that they got to 900mhz, but it wasn't that far off.

Re:Inflation of specs for student tasks

[mephistophyles]

I can understand how you might be able to be productive on your PC, but some people (quit playing games a few years ago) still need the high end stuff. I am an engineering student and do a lot of work with CAD software and heavy duty processing of data, so the lower-end my CPU and VGAs, the more time I have to wait on them to catch up with what I want to do. As Time is money, you can see how in some cases a high end PC can be necessary to do one's job.
On a sorta similar story, I was working as an intern in an engineering bureau, and we were working on a machine that was a tad slow and when big assemblies came up it would really start to stutter. I mentioned (don't remember the exact systems involved) that a certain set up would increase the speed and responsiveness of the computers and let everyone work a bit faster and the supervisor contacted the guy in charge of acquisitions right away. I was surprised at his reaction and one of the older guys explained to me that if we can spend a minute a day a piece less on waiting, (with almost a hundred engineers working in the company) that's an hour and a half man hours more each day, multiply that by the amount of days they work in a year and that's a pretty penny. Apparently some situations it is beneficial to get high-end hardware.
Sadly of course the new machines arrived 2 days before I was done there, but hey, I learned something new!

Re:Inflation of specs for student tasks

[Chandon Seldon]

1. Go to Digg.com in Firefox.
2. Open five comment threads in new tabs.
3. Go through the tabs and click the "expand all" button in each of them.
4. Firefox hasn't frozen, it's just processing AJAX really slowly.

   Personally, I see this as a bug in firefox (it should do javascript and user events in separate threads so it stays responsive), but a faster machine helps quite a bit.

Re:Inflation of specs for student tasks

[joshuaes]

This is incredibly true. I was doing tons of classwork on a 600Mhz machine running XP just fine. I got an upgrade to a 700Mhz computer with 512mb RAM which I overclocked to 812Mhz, which runs Ubuntu quite nicely. I also have an older Compaq desktop, P4 1.8Ghz 256mb RAM :(, that I do not touch, really. Once I get some RAM I'm sure I will though. All I have on that is XP for now, and the RAM really cripples that. If I had room on thag 40GB hard drive, I'd likely put on Ubuntu. What I can't seem to understand is why my old Compaq laptop, running a P3 700Mhz with 320mb RAM, runs XP damn perfect. It is actually quicker than the Ubuntu installation on the other partition. And as far as Open Office goes, I can't see much of a reason to use otherwise. As far as student use goes, it accomplishes everything and it does it well.

Re:Inflation of specs for student tasks

[Dekortage]

Totally agreed.

My wife recently went back to graduate school. Her seven-year-old laptop does everything she needs it to. It's a Mac PowerBook G3 (black case with Firewire, a.k.a. Apple's "Pismo" architecture) running at 400mhz, with 640mb of RAM, running the latest version of OS X (10.4.10) -- yes, Apple officially supports 10.4.x on Pismo systems (no XPostFacto required).

My wife uses the entire Microsoft Office suite for school; Photoshop CS 2 and iPhoto v5 run slowly on it, but she rarely uses them so it's not a big deal. She never plays games on it. The only irritation is that some courses now require using online multimedia, and certain Flash and streaming video pages are a little choppy (but let's face it, Flash on the Mac/PowerPC architecture has always been slower than it should have been). It's got built-in WiFi, USB and Firewire. I have added a bigger hard drive and more RAM to it over the years (six gigabytes dries up real fast with iPhoto) but the system is still chugging along. The main problem is that the LCD backlighting is growing dimmer with time, so the screen is getting harder to read. Other than that, there have never been any problems with it.

The Lombard and Pismo designs have dual hot-swappable bays: one for the battery and one for drives (DVD came with it, but we bought a used 250mb Zip for the bay a few years back). But -- and this is the coolest part -- you can put a second battery in the drive bay instead, netting nearly ten hours of real-time use. I miss that with my PowerBook G4... lucky to get three hours off of a full charge.

Re:Inflation of specs for student tasks

[lordtoran]

Germany has a tripartite high school system that selects students by their abilities. Gymnasium is just one of the school forms (and the most demanding one). The other two are Realschule and Hauptschule and aim to prepare their students for more ordinary careers. As an alternative to this system there are Gesamtschulen (also existing and known as "comprehensive schools" in the UK).

Re:Inflation of specs for student tasks

[Darundal]

OS over head (most people use what comes with the OS, which is generally what is currently being sold by Microsoft, which is always light on system resources) and bloat in many programs themselves.

Re:Inflation of specs for student tasks

[Lord Ender]

Like the other posters said, digg.com on Firefox on Linux is one. Zooming in and out on google maps quickly will overload a slow PC. Full screen video on Youtube will drop lots of frames on a slow PC. Lots of wiki-like software with rich text editors can seize up for seconds on obseleteware like yours. This last one is of the type which directly slows my productivity. Say you get a great idea in short term memory and you try to spray it out on a wiki. If it takes longer to load than the short term memory buffer of the human mind, you just lost some detail.

Re:Inflation of specs for student tasks

[Lehk228]

feeping creatures eat all the megahertz

Re:Inflation of specs for student tasks

[maeka]

K6-III peaked at 450.
K6-II went up to 550.
http://www.amd.com/us-en/Processors/ProductInforma tion/0,,30_118_1260_1288%5E1022~1515,00.html#1543
http://www.amd.com/us-en/Processors/ProductInforma tion/0,,30_118_1260_1288%5E1022~1572,00.html#1574

Re:Inflation of specs for student tasks

[toddestan]

Having integrated graphics probably hurts things a bit in that regard too. Also, nowadays, a "2Ghz" machine doesn't mean much. You could be refering to anything from a 6 year old P4 to a brand new Core 2 Duo system.

Re:Inflation of specs for student tasks

[sznupi]

Definatelly "bug" in Firefox...Opera (on AthlonXP 1700+) slows a bit in this scenario, but is completelly useable/"non-frozen".

I think I've read somewhere how their implementation of tabs/javascript is multithreaded...

Re:Inflation of specs for student tasks

[sznupi]

There were also a bit higher clocked K6-2+ and K6-III+...

Still, not anywhere near 700.

Re:Inflation of specs for student tasks

[sznupi]

That's really a problem with Youtube than with anything else...I do need to select "quality->low" in flash plugin when viewing fullscreen (AthlonXP 1700+)...but OTOH I've stumbled on a few flash video sites which don't require this.

Re:Inflation of specs for student tasks

[Carewolf]

In Austria or Germany

and the Netherlands, Denmark, Sweden, Norway, Finland, Switcherland, etc.

Basically in all germanic countries except the UK and Ireland.

Re:Inflation of specs for student tasks

[pedestrian crossing]

When I was in high school ("Gymnasium" as we call it over here in Europe),

Wierd! What do you call the gym?

Turnhalle

Re:Inflation of specs for student tasks

[nikanj]

Not in finland

Not to abuse an old cliche....

[goldspider]

....but will it run Linux?

Even with the MS tax, can you realistically buy or assemble a full PC with those specs for that kind of price? Sounds like a good entry-level Linux box to me!

Re:Not to abuse an old cliche....

[nomadic]

Even with the MS tax, can you realistically buy or assemble a full PC with those specs for that kind of price?

Sure. This plus this plus this plus this plus this plus this. Similar or better stats for $299 (and that includes shipping). And I guarantee the components are of better quality.

Re:Don't sell the students short

[Corporate Troll]

The problem here is that I know people that throw away their P-IV 2.6GHz/1Gig RAM because they consider it "crap hardware". That's what sad in this world. People consider my 2003 AMD MP 2400+/4Gig RAM "crap" because it isn't the latest Intel Core Duo. Well with Debian on it, it flies... Thank you very much...

Heck with a price like that and a sane operating system, this is really nice hardware. I began computing on a "state of the art IBM PS/2 Model 50", so really, this system is nice compared to what we had.

Re:Don't sell the students short

[Stachybotris]

Whether it leaves them disappointed or not depends on their 'needs'. The weakest thing cited in the summary is the 250-watt power supply. I'd never consider running a P3 with that, let alone a P4 or equivalent (even if it is only running at 1.5 GHz). A gig of RAM and an 80-gig hard-drive are just fine - that's what our workstations at my company run with, as well as the laptops that our sales team uses. And I can safely say that I know several people who are in their senior year, run similar setups, and haven't overflowed their drives with MP3s and movies yet.

On the other hand, I'm not sure about the quality of the hardware. I've never heard of either the manufacturer of the system or what I'm guessing is the motherboard.

Also, I have mixed feelings about OO.o being bundled with these systems. I'm glad to see that it's getting some face-time, but I worry that it'll get associated with Wal*Mart and therefore be considered just as crappy as everything else they sell.

It's in the processor

[InvisblePinkUnicorn]

I found this on the processor they're using:

"With a maximum power consumption of just 20 watts (2 watts average), the VIA C7®-D processor sets new standards..."

How much do 1.5GHz processors normally consume?

Re:It's in the processor

[Applekid]

According to this, the Sempron 2500+ runs at 1.4 GHz and had a thermal design profile of 59 W. I assume actual power consumption is greater than the thermal design.

Re:It's in the processor

[archen]

How much do 1.5GHz processors normally consume?

Sort of an interesting question depending upon how you look at it. My modern Athlon64 5000+ uses a lot more power than my pentium 133 ever did, however it would literally take the P133 45 minutes to encode an mp3, while my modern computer can do that in about 30 seconds or less. After my task is done I turn the machine off so which used more power?

That's sort of beside the point though, since you can assume most regular PCs at 1.5Ghz should consume around 60W or so. The VIA C7 is a low power CPU which initially seemed a very good choice for dedicated media boxes but the performance is severely lacking in places. For some people the VIA C7 is alright, but most people would probably be far better off with the cheapest AMD or Intel processors in terms of bang for buck. Not getting into the flaky VIA chipset issues either..

Re:It's in the processor

[skogs]

How, when the chip is designed to work at a certain power level, do you assume it takes more? It may indeed be slightly higher or lower, and indeed it does actually use some electricity to compute things - it does more than simply radiate heat - but so does a light bulb. You can be pretty sure that the chip itself is taking the 59 watts of power or less. Generally, the machine isn't running full tilt anyway - wasted cycles - and will generally run around 35-45watts.

This is more like the horsepower rating of your engine....it goes up to that amount but is usually less.

It is wholly unlike your milage estimate ... which is directly dependant on how a great many things far more out of the designers control. Milage is generally overstated. And so is horsepower. The designer does have control over the second though.

Re:It's in the processor

[samwichse]

Actually, that is incorrect. AMD calculates their TDP as a worst-case thermal output. From the linked article:

Thermal Design Power (TDP) is measured under the conditions of TCASE Max, IDD Max, and VDD=VID_VDD, and include all power dissipated on-die from VDD, VDDIO, VLDT, VTT, and VDDA.

Sam

Re:It's in the processor

[chrb]

I assume actual power consumption is greater than the thermal design. Thermal design rating is the maximum power the chip can consume whilst being adequately cooled. If actual power exceeds it, the chip will malfunction, possibly causing permanent damage.

Re:It's in the processor

[Bacon Bits]

The thermal design point is the maximum load the processor was spec'ed to handle. It is exactly like a roadway bridge specification. If it's built for 20 ton loads, you don't cross with more than 20 tons. If you do, you risk damage to the bridge which may result in catastrophic failure.

For a CPU, a system which is exceeding the TDP is generating more heat than it was designed to dissipate and drawing more power than the chip was designed to function with. This can result in overheating, instability, and damage to the CPU or motherboard.

Like bridges, CPUs are often overdesigned. A 20 ton spec bridge might, in reality, be able to support 40 tons with no problem. Overloading a bridge like this is exactly the same as electrically overclocking a processor. That is, over[i]volting[/i] a processor is likely to cause it to exceed it's TDP.

Re:It's in the processor

[Lehk228]

i wouldn't say "just like" an OC'd chip won't kill 100 people when it burns out

Re:Don't sell the students short

[Metaphorically]

But "The fact that the OS needs 1 GB of memory to function" is a fact. I peeked & poked on my C128 and I've developed on PICs, Basic Stamps and even smaller stuff. Paperclip was great on my Commie but that doesn't mean I'm going to haul it out of the closet and hand it to my daughter when she goes back to school. Real students doing their homework need hardware that suits the work. Lamenting the wasted bits in Vista doesn't help their grades.

Re:Slashdot Groupthink is strange

[uofitorn]

Thanks, you made me spray milk on my monitor from laughing.

Re:Don't sell the students short

[Corporate Troll]

I also wonder if you can build your own for that price including a legal copy of Vista. I highly doubt it.

It's not a bad deal at all

[Ignorant Aardvark]

Four years ago, when I was just starting university, I bought a $200 bargain basement GNU/Linux PC from Wal-Mart (unfortunately they don't sell these anymore). I used it as a personal server in my dorm room. Yeah, it was severely underpowered compared to my desktop, but it was just fine for using to tinker around with GNU/Linux. I used it for a good three years until I had enough money to buy something better. But what an incredible value that was, three years of experience for only $200. This latest machine looks to be good for exactly the same thing. Buy it, strip off Windows, put on GNU/Linux, and it makes a good first server.

I'd buy one...

[slapout]

...if it came with Windows XP.

Re:I'd buy one...

[mibalzonya]

Linux is going to scare the buyers that would be in the market for this computer.

Re:I'd buy one...

[mibalzonya]

Oops. No coffee yet.

Re:Slashdot Groupthink is strange

[kebes]

I just love the people who treat Slashdot as a single entity with a single opinion... and then proceed to point out hypocrisy in Slashdot because it holds two seemingly incompatible notions.

Interestingly, they usually describe this as "Groupthink" ... which is basically the notion that everyone starts supports the popular opinion. That is, that everyone agrees with each other to be part of the crowd, and suppress dissenting views. The irony, however, is that the very hypocrisy that is being referred to is telling evidence that groupthink is not as prevalent as it is assumed to be.

The fact is that Slashdot users have a variety of backgrounds and opinions. On every issue, there is a distribution of opinions. On some subjects we all seem to agree (e.g. "technology is good"), on others we mostly agree (e.g. "Linux is cool") and on others still there is so much disagreement that you will see completely contradictory and opposing opinions both modded up to +5 (e.g. "global warming is a myth").

Your example, of disliking MS but supporting Wal-Mart, is a total strawman. The general impression I get is that there is a consistent but not universal dislike of Microsoft's business tactics, and that there is solid division of opinion on the Wal-Mart issue. I've seen insightful comments both supporting the good that Wal-Mart does as part of a thriving free market, and insightful comments about the harm that Wal-Mart does as a megacorp that only cares about money. Both sides make good points and the most reasonable stance is probably a nuanced view that takes into account all of these factors. To suggest that Slashdot has a single opinion on these subjects betrays a serious lack of perspective on your part.

Your closing sentence, "I wish I lived in the fantasy world of most Slashdotters", again is deeply rooted in the fantasy that Slashdot is a single entity with a single mind, and that any self-contradictory statements it makes represent its own insanity, rather than diversity of opinion among its constituents.

Where to start.

[Joce640k]

"email takes substantial amounts of ram and cpu power..."

The machine has 1Gb RAM. My laptop has a quarter of that and seems to browse the web and run Office perfectly well.

As for CPU... I'm pretty sure it will cope with the heaviest of messenger sessions.

I've actually convinced myself that this computer is worse for students than I thought in the first place.

You need to climb down back to the real world. Very few people need garanteed sub-millisecond response times (or even knows what they are).

Re:Where to start.

[Andy Dodd]

I got through a good portion of my senior year of college (2002) using an ancient 233 MHz Pentium-MMX laptop. with an UPGRADE to 128M of RAM (from 64).

This included:
Word processing
Web browsing
IM
Matlab simulations
Circuit design with Eagle

I did have a 1 GHz Athlon Thunderbird available, but with the exception of the Matlab stuff, I took no productivity hit. In fact, if anything my productivity was higher because I could work while laying on my apartment's nice comfy couch instead of sitting at my desk. (This is why I used the laptop when I had another machine available.) In some ways the slowness of the Matlab stuff actuall increased productivity because it forced me/allowed me to multitask while my simulations ran.

Admittedly, the laptop ran Linux. Running Vista on this machine is likely crippling it so that 1GB RAM might indeed be insufficient.

Re:Where to start.

[niiler]

I got through graduate school running a 166 MHz PII with 128 MB RAM and a 5 GB Harddrive. We kept most of our data on 100 MB zip disks. I mainly used PV-Wave (an IDL clone), LabVIEW, Netscape, and a high-end (at the time) neural network simulator which would take something like 5-15 minutes to train a given network.

Let the "well in my day we used an abacus" stories begin!

Re:Where to start.

[Metaphorically]

And my abacus only had nine beads...

The software that we used in school isn't available any more. I can't get Becky any more (oops - looks like I can). Netscape 2.0 isn't going to cut it. Wordperfect 5 for DOS was great on memory use but I just can't use it any more.

Students need hardware just like everyone else. A decent CPU, a couple gigs of RAM (if you want the computer to last until the end of the year), that's the foundation. This box has neither but does come with a resource-hungry OS.

Re:Where to start.

[OldeTimeGeek]

Ok, I'll bite...

My college computer was an Exidy Sorcerer with a 2.5 MHz Zilog Z80 processor, 32KB RAM and a Radio Shack portable tape recorder. I used it to do my compiler and assembler class assignments. In Microsoft 8K BASIC. My instructors loved it because they had never seen one before.

The CS lab had an Imsai 8080, but was used by the card reader and was unavailable to students.

Re:Where to start.

[Anonymous Coward]

The problem is, those specs barely run Vista. Now if you install something like win98 or DSL than you're in for a very fast machine.

Re:Where to start.

[Stamen]

I got through 6th grade with a Commodore 64 and a "cracked" copy of Ultima 4 and "The Bard's Tale".

Anyone remember how we use to have to "crack" these games? For you younger peeps, gather 'round, grandpa's got a story for ya.
It involved 1 of 2 things (let me know if I'm remembering this wrong):

* Some games had a key you entered every time you played. The crack here was simply copying the paper or card with the keys as well as the diskette(s), which was harder than you might imagine as photocopiers only existed at big companies and libraries. Sometimes they made it harder by having this little wheel you had to spin around or the keys were on the bottom of the book it came with (go to page 56, type in key 5, sort of thing).

* Some games had copy protection on the diskettes, so you couldn't copy them; this was done in various ways (similar to how some CD/DVDs are done today). Usually we would have a program, that would have a list of games it could copy, and for each game it would have specific instructions on how to make a clean copy of it. We all had these "cracking" programs. You would have to get new versions every once in a while with the latest list of games.

My friends and I would have "LAN" parties, which, of course, as there was no networking, involved us dragging our computers over to our friends house and playing games NEXT to each other, rather than with each other. It was cool though, as when you found something new, your friend could walk over and verify that indeed, you are the ultimate Ultima fighting champion.

Re:Where to start.

[John Biggabooty]

A gig was a substantial amount of Ram in XP, more than most users would need. In Vista however, it's a bare minimum. Vista may say on the box it works with 512MB, but try it. It is crazy slow! You need 2GB to have a system that is usable.

Everyone who has made a negative comment so far has gone quickly to -1 land, but I had to put in my two cents worth. Doesn't it say in the guide to moderation that if you disagree, don't mod down, respond?

Re:Where to start.

[Random832]

The software that we used in school isn't available any more. I can't get Becky any more (oops - looks like I can). That site advertises a "30 day free trial" but nowhere can I find what the price is for the full version.

Re:Where to start.

[Canthros]

1. The $300 PC should be plenty sufficient for most classwork-related needs for at least the next year or two. Boosting the RAM will probably extend that a bit farther. Adding a dedicated video card might even make it practical for many popular (if not new) PC games. For students pursuing many liberal arts degrees, it'll probably be sufficient for their entire college career, even if the software remains rather out of date.
2. At $300, they can probably afford to buy an OEM copy of Windows XP to downgrade the OS to something that doesn't suck on the hardware, and then, effectively, throw the machine in the trash at the end of the year to buy a new one in the fall.

Granted, a gig-and-a-half Via processor isn't any too beefy for a new computer, but it's not that much less powerful that the five-year-old Athlon XP I use at home (under Win 2k, though). And it's undoubtedly more powerful than the 166Mhz Pentium (with MMX! and 48MB of RAM!) I was issued as a freshman almost ten years ago, and the 700Mhz desktop Athlon I had the last year I was a college student. Ultimately, the issue you seem to be missing isn't that don't need computers, it's that your average schmoe still doesn't need much of a computer for 80-100% of what they're doing with it.

What I'm getting at is that not everybody is/was a compsci or engineering student (or does 3D modeling, or whatever).

Re:Where to start.

[CmdrGravy]

I undertook my CS course with no computer whatsoever, OK I left after a year but most people I knew who stayed on never had a computer ( and one of them still doesn't even today ).

Re:Where to start.

[wx327]

The machine has 1Gb RAM. My laptop has a quarter of that and seems to browse the web and run Office perfectly well.

But are you running Vista? ;-)

Re:Where to start.

[trolltalk.com]

"a couple gigs of RAM "

Oh, come off it ... 640 megs should be enough for anybody.

Re:Where to start.

[ricegf]

I did my EE senior project (in 1984) on an Atari 800 with 48k of RAM (took 3 cards to hold all those memory chips!) and a floppy disk drive that wrote 88k per disk (unless you used the "hole punch trick", in which case it was a "flippy" and could hold 176k :-).

For the project, I designed and built a processor from discrete TTL gates (!), and used the Atari to write its operating system as well as a processor simulator to debug it. All this in Atari 8k BASIC.

And I got an A, too. :-) :-)

Better yet, as a cooperative education student with NASA, I was actually paid to write a general aviation flight simulator cockpit on the Atari (in raw assembler), and was flown to Oshkosh to present it at the Experimental Aircraft Association convention. I still remember the Apple II and Commodore 64 fans who were determined to argue that their computers were better for flying an airplane than an Atari.

Crazy kids, we were. But I've never understood every bit in every register in any computer since then.

Re:Where to start.

[bberens]

It's entirely possible that the OEM install of Vista that Wal-Mart has installed on the machines has EVERYTHING shut off so that it runs cleanly on 1GB. Assuming they'll have demo machines available for play in the store it's unlikely they'll put it out there if it has embarrassing performance. Either way, for the Wal-Mart computer purchasing market this PC is much better than no PC.

Re:Where to start.

[MsGeek]

Throw a real OS on there -- Edubuntu would do nicely -- and this machine would be excellent for a student. If you absolutely need MS Office, Office2K run under WINE would be a winner. Without the overhead of Vista OO.org would run fine on this machine.

My concern would be that the capacitors might blow in a couple of years. Otherwise, this would be fine.

Re:Where to start.

[reddburn]

The Atari 800 was my first computer - and well indeed am I acquainted with the "hole punch" trick, only we used a pair of scissors to snip a notch into the side. That was a pretty nice machine, for the time: letter perfect was a nice little word processor, and I can remember my dad using about a half dozen floppy disks to create a database in Data Perfect - not only that, but he was awed by how "few" disks it took! He called his brother to brag. He got his Ph.D. in Ecology in 1977 at the University of Tennessee. When he got computer time, he would use a hand truck to take his boxes of punched cards (do NOT bend, spindle, or mutilate) from where he stored them to the computer.

And here I bitch about my 80GB hard disk being too small.

Re:Where to start.

[HeavyAl]

I totally remember having to do this. Some games (Like the original Sierra: KQ, LSL, etc or Wasteland) we'd find text files on BBS's of all the page/paragraph/word codes if we didn't have the original book.

I remember on copy protection that I hit the 'jackpot' when I got this cool expansion board from my uncle that I plugged into one of my early XT machines that would allow you to copy all kinds of copy protected disks even if they used the old broken sector method (where they would actually damage the disk in one spot as a form of protection) .. that thing was gold to me at the time, I could copy just about anything with it; felt a bit like a rock star because everyone else in town would come to me to get copies of stuff they wanted.

Sometimes I miss the eighties!

Re:Where to start.

[CautionaryX]

They're using Vista Basic for these desktops. It's already stripped down by default; Vista's most enticing feature (Aero) isn't even on it.

Re:Where to start.

[manekineko2]

Running Vista on this machine is likely crippling it so that 1GB RAM might indeed be insufficient.

I think you're confusing Vista Basic which doesn't come with Aero and runs on hardware comparable to XP, with the other versions of Vista, which come with a fancy-pants new UI that sucks the resources.

Re:Where to start.

[toadlife]

You need 2GB to have a system that is usable. So many have said this about Vista, but it has not been my experience at all.

My work computer is a Athlon64 3000 (Single Core, 1.8Ghz) with 1GB RAM and a cheap GeForce graphics card that barely supports Aero. I'm currently running Vista Enterprise with Aero turned on.

With McAfee Virusscan 8.5, Outlook 2003, Firefox with four tabs open, Thunderbird, Yahoo Messenger, a couple of MMC consoles, an RDP session and a puTTy session running, my machine is currently using 731MB of RAM.

Vista is a little more sluggish than XP was on this machine, but it is certainly usable.

Re:Where to start.

[dugjohnson]

Me too.... When I went to college we had teletypes. We were considered progressive because A) our student IDs were a log-in and B) BASIC was available to everyone since it was invented there. Didn't have to use punch cards. Woohoo! When I did a program to model a gravitational field, I had to go to the engineering building to get access to a plotter so I could see what it looked like. Just a bunch of asterisks on the teletype.

Re:Where to start.

[dhasenan]

No, the demo machine will have 2GB RAM and a dedicated video card.

Re:Where to start.

[jalagl]

A friend had this expansion card that was the only thing (at the time) able to copy copy-protected games ... I think it was called Copy II PC, and worked with a software program to make a bit by bit copy.

He used to charge something like $5 to make a copy of King's Quest I and II.

Re:Where to start.

[TheRaven64]

Some games had a key you entered every time you played.

I used to have a game called Realms that had this kind of protection. It would ask for a random word from the manual every run. After a while, I realised that it didn't have a copy of the complete manual in the game (it came on two 360KB disks), and only asked a handful of page/paragraph/line combinations. It didn't take me long to memorise these.

Re:Where to start.

[Mr2cents]

My friends and I would have "LAN" parties, which, of course, as there was no networking, involved us dragging our computers over to our friends house and playing games NEXT to each other, I did a 'LAN' party in 1989 with two amiga's and a null-modem cable. We played Populous II all weekend. Now there's an evil game in multiplayer mode...

Re:Where to start.

[John Biggabooty]

My guess is that having a video card has made the difference for you. My Lenovo 3000 N100 Laptop with Intel graphics was a dog until I upgraded to 2GB. Getting rid of the unwanted trialware and adding an SD card for Windows Readyboost made no real difference. Only a ram upgrade did, and I still feel like XP ran faster on my old HP laptop with an Athlon XP 1500+ and 768 megs of SDRAM.

Re:Where to start.

[aztracker1]

Funny, I'm running the same Laptop.. though I planned on 2gb of ram for it (really cheap upgrade now)... In any case, the big reason Vista was mainly dog slow on the thing, was all the crap-ware, and extra junk installed.. runs pretty fast under Linux.. though you need to get ALSA 1.0.14 on it, which was the real pita part... I got it mainly as something to play around on.. my desktop is where my real work happens though. For the same, or near same price, you could have bought a laptop with either ATI, or nVidia graphics that will work a bit better for many things... I wanted this to run Linux, and some other stuff, so opted for Intel chip-set, and better Linux compatibility.

Re:Don't sell the students short

[Barny]

Yup, wholeheartedly agree with both you and the parent, that is more than adequate for desktop publishing (shit, is that term even used any more?) web surfing, email, programming... damn near anything ANY average user wants a computer for.

The fact that it runs vista (400-500M ram used to boot, maybe 100M max for virus/malware scanner, plenty of headroom) and OOo is a good thing, we have been doing that on our stores systems for a while now (although, we load firefox, OOo, spybot S&D, Ad-Aware, windows updates: dotnetfx2 + 100 or so post sp2 patches, java, VLC media player, CCCP), the big peeps are starting to catch on that people just don't want crap.

Remember too, a lot of these people will buy a PS3/xbox360/Wii for games, rather than spend several thou on a pc, and more yearly to keep it up to specs.

Of course this post is written on such a gaming PC monster, but there is still a 2400+ with 1G of ram and a fx5700 churning packets in the corner running MONOWall (freeBSD) ^_^

I suspect you could

[benhocking]

I'm sure extra $300 that £300 will get you will cover S&H.

Simple solution

[InvisblePinkUnicorn]

"Of course, the moving parts and the monitor will still use as much power as they do in any other system, but this machine could easily consume over 100 W less than is typical nowadays."

If they truly wanted to make it power efficient compared to other computers, it would as simple as forcing the monitor (which would be LCD of course) to go into standby if the computer hasn't been in use for 15 minutes. I shudder to think how much power was being wasted when I used to work at a national lab, where everyone left their computer running overnight with various ridiculous "screen savers" running on CRTs.

Re:Simple solution

[RAMMS EIN]

You may be surprised to know that many common TFTs still use significant amounts of power, even when in standby (some even when off!).

Compared to a PC that runs at over 100 W, it probably doesn't matter too much, but if your PC uses about 20 W, it matters if your monitor uses 1 W or 20 W.

Re:Simple solution

[mr_mischief]

If power efficiency is the only major goal, hard drives would be replaced by flash, too. Vista does, I'm sure, support a monitor timeout to take that choice away from the customer, though, takes away thing like watching a movie (What? do you move your mouse around while watching movies?).

Also, besides the C7 being very low power, it also dissipates very little heat and doesn't usually need a CPU cooling fan. If it does use a fan, it's a little thing that takes nearly no power compared to a lot of processor fans. Don't be surprised if you find out this system has a passively cooled CPU, chipset, and video system.

Re:Simple solution

[toddestan]

Actually, what really surprised me is how much dimming the flatpanel helps with the power consumption. Taking one down from "burn your eyeballs out" default full brightness to something more reasonable cut the power usage in half according to my power meter. At full brightness it was only at about 1/2 of what a similar CRT was using.

I'll take the crap.

[hal2814]

A few months ago I bought a Dell with an Athlon X2 3600, 1GB RAM, 80GB HDD, and XP Home off the Dell Outlet site for $260 shipped. It was "Previously Ordered New" which generally means the original owner never even opened the package. I'll take the crapware and an X2 over no crapware and the C7.

Silver platter syndrome

[whyde]

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.

I'd just like to point out the absurdity of describing such a powerful computer with terms normally used to describe a 4-function calculator.

When I entered college, I paid for my own 8086 turbo, running DOS 3.something, and a 1200 baud modem. It had a 32MB RLL hard drive. It was also "more than capable of performing basic tasks."

This recalls Wirth's Law (from Nicklaus Wirth of the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich): "Software gets slower faster than hardware gets faster." Stated another way, "Intel giveth and Microsoft taketh away."

Re:Silver platter syndrome

[rlp]

When I entered college, I paid for my own 8086 turbo, running DOS 3.something, and a 1200 baud modem.

You had a 1200 baud modem! We had to hit rocks together in binary.

Re:Silver platter syndrome

[itof500]

Wow. You had computers in college? The most electronics we had were the desktop calculators.

duke out

Re:Silver platter syndrome

[turing_m]

But you try and tell the young people today that... and they won't believe ya'.

Actually...

[benhocking]

I believe part of their point was that if they built their own, they wouldn't have to repartition/reformat the hard drive in order to remove Vista...

Re:Laptop specs - Linky Linky

[Eightyford]

Hmm, that is my laptop in a big box. Anyhoo, Dell also sells some PCs with a 'no trailware' option. It seems that manufacturers are seeing the light. I wonder how much the 'PC Decrapifier' project has to do with this change of heart.

http://www.pcdecrapifier.com/

Re:Don't sell the students short

[fermion]

Yes, if you write code and efficiently do such work, such hardware is going to be sufficient. I recall ging through megabytes of telemetry, seperating them, analyzing them, and graphing them on a 6800 with a tens megabytes of ram. I was ok.

But here is what I am see the average student told. You have to learn MS Office. IE is the interner. You have to turn your work in in office format. Employers will expect it. Sure, a kid could do a paper in a text editor. Most is more than sufficient for the task. On the make Textedit is more powerful than anything I used before I went to the college. But I am sure that teachers and peer pressure expects more.

Here is what I think about this machine. If it is a college machine, then they did not include MS Office because they know the kids that want it will get it somehow, legally payiing $50 at the school.Likewise, few kids are likely to download cygwin and program through emacs and gcc. They will get Visual studio. And these programs are bloat. Even if they do the OSS route, many of the OSS GUIS are based on Qt or the equivelent, which eat up resources as well.

Which is to say that ideally, yes, a hand me down laptop from 3 years ago should be enough for any student, but I increasingly see schools getting fanatic about the hardware, and letting the education go.

Re:Don't sell the students short

[Corporate Troll]

there is still a 2400+ with 1G of ram and a fx5700 churning packets in the corner running MONOWall (freeBSD) ^_^

Which is severe overkill for a firewall. I've ran my server (which does more than just routing packets) for years on a P-I 166/32Meg RAM. The only thing that it wasn't powerful enough for was IMAP, but that's somehow excusable. My parents run my old desktop (bought in 1999, I think...) as a server: it's a P-III 800MHz/768Meg RAM, full SCSI. Essentially, it doesn't do much all day.

My own server is now a AMD64 2800+/2Gig RAM. I replaced the P-I because it began hard to get parts for it and in case of a failure, I'd be in trouble. That, and I wanted to try OpenBSD/amd64 and hoped that Cool 'n Quiet would make it very quiet. Alas, that last one turned out to be a mistake.

Home server? My best guess is that any PC running ~500MHz will do the job just fine for anything you throw at it. Heck, my last laptop was a P-III 600MHz/512Meg RAM and it ran everything I needed just fine. It just started to fall physically apart and thus had to be replaced.

depends

[misanthrope101]

I lived through the last 3 months of a 4-month school term using Knoppix on a 933MHz laptop with 256megs of RAM. I hosed my Win2K install and didn't have the time or inclination to fix it. Knoppix allowed me to surf the net, at least well enough to use WebTycho (UMUC student) to complete my four classes, to include writing papers in OpenOffice, reading Powerpoint presentations, looking at PDFs, writing a few C++ programs, and so on. The experience actually sold me on Linux as a permanent OS.

People with more robust needs would obviously need a more robust computer. But you can do a lot with modest hardware. Complex/large documents can be accomplished with LaTeX, though Abiword would probably suffice for the gui-inclined. Firefox works fine even from a LiveCD. But I'm aware that some people need certain software packages that would require more computing power.

I've always disliked that colleges force students to use a certain software package. Programming classes should not require a certain IDE--when taking my C++ course I used text editors and the command line. For a web design course the prof mandated a particular FTP program, but the command line worked well enough for me. I'm aware that there are some courses that do dictate that software title X must be used, so no solution is good for everyone.

A/V companies pay for placement on Dell machines

[winkydink]

Which is why different mfg's appear from time to time. Dell gets millions of dollars from the a/v mfg's to install this "crapware".

Windows Tax Refund?

[Doc Ruby]

Is there any way to calculate how much of that $298 pays for its Windows OS?

Does MS just give them away "free" to companies like Everex/Wal-Mart, just to protect their platform marketshare for selling Windows apps (or reporting marketshare)? Isn't all of that anticompetitive, probably explicitly so under the various (though largely unenforced) monopoly verdict decrees?

Or can you get your MS tax refund if you delete it and send it back? Has anyone pulled that off lately? Or maybe, possibly, convince Wal-Mart to save the expense, and sell a cheaper PC with Linux installed - or nothing installed, but with a Linux LiveCD/netinstaller?

Re:Windows Tax Refund?

[Doc Ruby]

You could have posted a comment with info content, except, you actually want readers to turn off our brains. Because you're a TROLL.

Re:Windows Tax Refund?

[westlake]

Or can you get your MS tax refund if you delete it and send it back? Has anyone pulled that off lately?

Try reading the bill of sale.

It will explicity describe your purchase of a PC with an OEM Vista install. Microsoft's EULA may not bind you but Walmart's contract of sale sure as hell does.

Does MS just give them away "free" to companies like Everex/Wal-Mart, just to protect their marketshare

OEM Linux tanked at Walmart. Walmart sees steady after-market sales of PC hardware and software. Windows gaming is still a billion-dollar industry. Microsoft doesn't have to give anything.

Re:Don't sell the students short

[jstomel]

Bullshit. Uunless you are a visual arts or CS major, there is no homework you will not be able to do on this machine. And if you're not running the fancy-but-useless graphics interface in vista (which you won't be with an integrated graphics chip) then it won't take up so much system. Serously, there is nothing your standard english lit or communications major needs to run that won't run on three year old hardware.

Re:Don't sell the students short

[LWATCDR]

Okay let's take a look at the "real world"
1. It has Vista Home Basic so no Aero. It probably will not be stressing the harware.
2. It has a gig of Ram. I have NO problem running XP media Center and OpenSuse on a system with a Gig of ram as a duel boot. Open Office runs just fine.
3. It is under $300.
4. I has a DVD drive so yes you can watch DVDs on it.
5. It has IE on it. The sad truth is some sites require IE to work correctly. This is changing but having IE to fall back on does make life easy.
6. It has Open Office. Which gives you a lot of good tools.
7. Did I mention it is under $300. Less than a PS/3 or 360?
8. It only has an 80 gig drive. So it has 6 USB ports. Think Geek was selling 80 Gig external drives for under $50! Those are much better to put your music and videos on anyway. When the RIAA and Montag come knocking at your door they my not find your external drive with your MP3s or your collection of books.
9. It uses SATA for the HD. I bet you could put in another or a Larger drive if you really wanted it.
10. So it only has one gig of ram. It has an open memory slot. Go buy an extra gig.

For a High school kid or even a college student this would be a good machine. Frankly a lot of businesses could work just fine off one of these. It also doesn't use a lot of power thanks to the C7 CPU.

As to just building your own. Not everyone wants to build their own PC or even knows how. This machine with an LCD monitor would be a handy little system for many people.
I don't know if it has any open slots but even without them you could add WiFi with USB. You could also add a TV tuner so it could be you kids TV as well.
In other words it seems like a good deal for some people. The fact that it will not play the latest and greatest games I can only see as a plus.

stupid broken hyperlink

[nomadic]

Last one should have been this.

Re:Don't sell the students short

[Antony-Kyre]

This is off-topic, but I want your opinion, if you don't mind.

If given the choice between Windows XP (any version) and Windows Vista (any version), which would you choose (if price weren't a factor)?

Assuming you said Windows XP, could you give me some reasons why?

Personally, I don't trust Windows Vista. I heard bad things about it, and I see no reason to abandon XP.

It's all good

[PhotoGuy]

I know a lot of people hate Wal-Mart. I personally don't, I guess I haven't watched the right documentaries yet, to tell me what to think, or something.

And yeah, Wal-Mart probably isn't doing this out of the goodness of their hearts, nor to boost open source, nor to satisfy the few Linux people. Their motivation is undoubtedly to make money, and they usually do that by giving consumers what they want (a cheap item, that does the job).

Well, we should be proud that OpenOffice is seen as a viable enough too in their delivery of such a product, especially one aimed at students. It really is a big step in the right direction, and validates Open Source to a very large degree.

-dale

Re:It's all good

[jim_deane]

On the other hand, many colleges either provide Microsoft Office for a very low media fee, or for a very low student discount price.

So perhaps Wal Mart is figuring that students will just buy the cheap PC and then get the $12 version of MS Office from school. They probably include OOo as the default just to have something to provide. "Use this until you get MS Office from school..."

Just guessing.

Re:It's all good

[Stamen]

Off topic, sort of, but there are plenty of reasons to dislike Wal*Mart without blinding following the "right documentaries". Simply go there, look around, and pay attention. Wal*Mart to many of us represents a move from an open free market where people can live the American dream by starting small companies and having their success based on their hard work, to a quasi communist state where everything is owned and controlled by a few.

I find it ironic that those who should be the most against such a company tend to love it; those whose manufacturing jobs got moved to China and who were laid off from their job at the local hardware store, where they made a living, only to be forced to work for minimum wage dressed in a smock with only a first name. Wal*Mart is a leading reason that so much manufacturing is done in China and not the US. Don't take my word for it, listen to traditional iconic American companies which say themselves that the only reason they moved work overseas is because Wal*Mart forced them to.

I don't think we should legislate against companies such as Wal*Mart, they aren't doing anything illegal. We simply shouldn't shop there. Go down the street, buy something from your neighbor's store. Sure you won't have as much stuff, because it's slightly more expensive, but in the long run we'll all be better off. Buying a Ford truck made in Mexico, and putting a huge flag on it, doesn't make you patriotic, buying your goods from Tom and Amy's hardware store down the street does.

That's all I'm sayin'

Re:It's all good

[Chandon Seldon]

I personally don't, I guess I haven't watched the right documentaries yet, to tell me what to think, or something.

Another way to read this is simply that you haven't educated yourself enough to form a valid opinion.

Sure, lots of people complain about lots of things. Many of those people are blatantly incorrect, but some of them are right. The thing is, there's no way to tell the difference until you look into it. If you assume that someone is wrong without actually bothering to understand the issue, you're the one who's blatantly incorrect.

I'm not specifically talking about Wal-mart here. I haven't looked into it enough to have a valid opinion. But I'm not going to arbitrarily assume that people who are going out of their way to complain about an issue are just gibbering idiots.

Re:It's all good

[Chandon Seldon]

I don't think we should legislate against companies such as Wal*Mart, they aren't doing anything illegal.

That's horrible logic.

Re:It's all good

[hal2814]

"buying your goods from Tom and Amy's hardware store down the street does."

Or depending on how Tom and Amy run their store, it makes you an idiot. In my town, we have two Mom and Popish hardware stores that are really stuggling now that one of the big boxen are in town. And they deserve it. They both close at 5PM (close all day on Sunday), carry minimal inventory, and charge about twice as much for most power tools. One is rather unfriendly and one of them is often staffed by very unknowledgeable high schoolers. I go to one of them still for some lumber and pine bark because their prices are better in those areas but I hate every trip.

On the other hand, we have a locally owned grocery store in my town and I very much prefer it to our other grocery stores in town (especially the Wal-Mart grocery). They are not open on Sunday either but they have better prices and quality on both meat and produce. Their store is very clean even though the building is very old. They even have most of their registers open at any given time so I can get in and out quickly. That's the kind of store I'd really hate to see go. Fortunately, it's rather obvious from the crowd that's always shopping there that it's not going anywhere any time soon.

I guess my point is that Mom and Pop vs. Big Box isn't some black and white battle. Sometimes that big box isn't some dump that just has cheaper prices. And sometimes that mom and pop isn't some wonderful store that's getting run out of town because of consumers wanting to save a buck. Some of those local owners deserve to get run out of business.

Re:It's all good

[Stamen]

Heh, yeah, I see your point. That is horrible logic, I'll rephrase: Wal*Mart isn't doing anything illegal, and I don't think we should legislate new laws to stop them. We, the consumers, already have the power to make changes, with our wallets and where we choose to shop.

Re:It's all good

[turing_m]

"We, the consumers, already have the power to make changes, with our wallets and where we choose to shop."

That works really well... if you happen to live in Galt's Gulch.

Outside of an Ayn Rand novel, the vast bulk of people aren't intelligent or motivated enough to realize that Walmart is anything other than a big store that sells stuff cheap. They don't realize that the logical endpoint of allowing imports from countries at slave labor prices is that local businesses aren't able to compete without treating their workers exactly the same, which they aren't able to do without operating illegally.

And that's ignoring the issue of being dependent on a nation that probably doesn't have your best interests at heart.

Re:It's all good

[turing_m]

The fortunate thing is, many of these commodity PC buyers won't need to switch. For any school assignment, OOo works just as well as MS. Ditto tracking personal expenses, creating a résumé or job application letter, or most other mundane tasks.

That's the beginning of mindshare. And it's not something that MS can easily counter. Selling to students is a great way to do some price differentiation, and gain mindshare for future corporate purchases. They can't do that at WalMart, if they did that they might as well give Office away everywhere.

For that reason, perhaps when there is a computer on every desk and in every home... it will be running FOSS software.

Or ...

[Colin Smith]

This is the exact logic I disagree with. Web browsing, email and word processing are easy to say but they all take substantial amounts of ram and cpu power. Then throw in the essential virus/malware scanner and firewall and you'll burn that one gig of ram in no time. You could stick Ubuntu on it and it'll be fine for the next 5 years.

Re:Or ...

[Metaphorically]

Funny but until I got a new desktop last year my main machine was a 1200MHz AMD Thunderbird I built back around 2000-2001. It ran XP for a few years but has had OpenSuse 10.1 on it since that came out. Now, with some upgrades, it's my myth frontend and runs some other server-type stuff for me. You definitely can get more longevity out of hardware with Linux (note I said "can" not "always do").

Ubuntu might work for a lot of students but definitely not all (just like there are people who can't figure out how to use MySpace or Google).

Re:Don't sell the students short

[montyzooooma]

£300 buys a lot of pc from somewhere like Bigpockets.co.uk - admittedly not with the low power chip. eg http://www.bigpockets.co.uk/product.php?lang=&subm enu=&menu=&product_id=21739&session=7eaa349ae095a8 07fc4bd36e58a56139 at £210.00 plus another 80 quid for XP Pro. (prices inc vat and I *think* delivery within the UK mainland.) If you want lower power consumption just underclock it.

Anyone buy this already?

[My name is Bucket]

I'd like to know if it's any good for reinstalling OSs, dropping in a video card or extra RAM and so on.

Re:Anyone buy this already?

[flyingfsck]

Via hardware typically runs better on Linux than on Windoze, so you should be OK for a re-install. You can always install Windows in VMware or Qemu if you need it, so don't toss the discs away.

Re:Anyone buy this already?

[My name is Bucket]

Good to know, but I'm more interested in the 6800GT I've got lying around. Supposedly it's got a free PCI-E slot, but does it have a Molex(?) power cord? The CPU is low-power-- but even then, would 250W be enough?

Re:Don't sell the students short

[tkrotchko]

Are you sure that a gig of RAM isn't enough to run Vista perfectly fine? I think you can run the Ultimate version with that much RAM. I mean, you really can't add much more than 3G of RAM to Vista 32 bit (it won't recognize 4GB), and 2GB is probably as much as you'll need if you're doing specialty work.

It looks perfectly fine for web/office work. I can't see where it lacks for it's primary market. And if the only lack is RAM, then, presumably, you can bump it up to 2G for under $100.

Now, I'm not commenting on the PC, but even if it's crap, for $300 you can't lose. An $800 PC will depreciate by $300 as soon as you open the box. This PC almost makes sense to buy and throw away once a year and keep getting $300 PC's. But I doubt you need to do that.

Re:Slashdot Groupthink is strange

[Demona]

Only idiots and trolls claim that "Slashdot" is a real person.

Re:Don't sell the students short

[vux984]

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

Disappointed compared to the 'antique' Pentium II 300 with 32MB RAM and windows 98 they were using before?

For a lot of people especially students this is a huge upgrade.

A 250 watt power supply is more than adequate for a nominal cpu without a power sucking video card. Sure the CPU is behind the curve, but then, so is a P-II 350. The hard drive is more than adequate, and the RAM is where it needs to be... and adding more is inexpensive.

I'm not saying its a great computer, or that there aren't better deals around but this, all things considered, isn't bad.

Re:Don't sell the students short

[mwvdlee]

Memory mainly, but also CPU performance.
Vista really needs more than the 1GB RAM provided in this machine, and the 1.5GHZ Via CPU will probably be a bit underpowered too.
Vista uptake is probably slow because of this double whammy; it requires more expensive hardware but doesn't use that extra power for something anybody actually needs.

Re:Don't sell the students short

[Pumpkin Tuna]

My current home computer is a nearly 5-year-old Sony 1.5 ghrtz with 1 gig of RAM, an 80-GB hard drive and a lot of miles on it. Yet with an upgraded graphics card and an external hard drive, it still does just about everything I need, up to and including video editing with Adobe Premiere. Granted, I am about ready to replace it, it's no emergency. As as a teacher, I know what computer tasks the average k-12 student needs to accomplish, and this thing should handle it. I think it would be a great resource for that parent who wants a computer so their kid can excel, but CAN'T scrape up anything more than $300. Too bad it's being sold at the Evil Empire.

Re:Don't sell the students short

[Andy Dodd]

His post implied pretty clearly his problem with Vista on such a machine was Vista's significantly increased hardware requirements compared to XP.

The fact that Vista is bloatware is no secret, not even MS tries to hide it.

Re:Don't sell the students short

[Saiboogu]

Calling BS on that one. Or, your idea of a "performance issue" and mine are vastly different.

I have two machines on my desk here at work. One is XP Pro with a gig of RAM, and I use it as my primary system. Outlook, Word, Excel, SQL Enterprise Manager/Query Analyzer, and several other applications are running on a regular basis and I have no real issues with it. It bogs down occasionally, but only when I'm pushing it to perform a few tasks at once.

The other machine runs Vista Business with 512 of RAM. I use it for testing sites in IE7, and casual browsing in Firefox. It routinely freezes completely for 10-60 seconds if I do something as simple as scroll down the page in Firefox. And don't jump to blaming Firefox for that one - I've tweaked the memory usage as much as possible and it's currently sitting at 90MB used for 6 tabs - Not too shabby for a modern browser. Opening a new tab in IE7 takes 10-15 seconds. Minimizing one browser and pulling up the other can take a minute (literally). Locking the PC (Win-L) randomly takes anywhere from 30 seconds to a full minute.

Vista looks nice, but the truth is, it's a hog. Barely usable on 512MB. I couldn't even stand the lack of responsiveness when I (briefly) ran it at home with 2GB of RAM, but I'll accept that I was probably being too picky on that one.

Crapware, why waste money to avoid it?

[Shivetya]

You of course could get a better compaq for http://www.walmart.com/catalog/product.do?product_ id=5750873

If your trying to dodge crapware wasting money on an already out of date machine isn't the way to do it. I prefer the Dell as it has future expandibility I do not think the Everex has. You can pop 4gb on the Dell board. The Nvidia 6150LE chipset is very well known and good. The dual core processor will have more longevity.

Frankly, if one of us had the choice and had to buy one of these who would not go with the Dell and just wipe it? If my parents were looking I would make them get the Dell, at least I know the components and crapware isn't but a few minutes of work to ditch

Re:Crapware, why waste money to avoid it?

[Applekid]

I don't think longevity is a tracked metric for vendors trying to get their products onto the shelves at Wal-Mart.

My parents are Wal-Mart devotees. Just about everything they buy is from there. They always express frustration when their nearly-new food processor breaks, or bargain clothes start falling apart, or they find the automatic "disassemble" button on the lawn furniture. I try to explain to them that quality costs money but they just haven't made the connection yet.

For those who have more time than money, I guess.

Re:Slashdot Groupthink is strange

[DogDude]

The general impression I get is that there is a consistent but not universal dislike of Microsoft's business tactics, and that there is solid division of opinion on the Wal-Mart issue.

Perfect example. We're looking at two massive consumer-related companies. One is much more reviled than the other, as you're pointed out. Is there any rationale for that? Any real reason? Not that I can see. I know of plenty of people who have been hurt by Wal-Mart. I know of communities that have been damaged by Wal-Mart. That's real. Who does MS oppress? What communities do they damage? What people are being kept in poverty by Microsoft. Comparing the two is ridiculous, at best, yet even you point out the clear dichotomy that is expressed here on Slashdot.

Perhaps you should look up "group think" and the literary basis for the idea. It's not "a single mind" as you say it is.

Re:Don't sell the students short

[GIL_Dude]

Just clarification: you can't run the "fancy-but-useless" graphics interface on Vista Basic (which this machine ships with) regardless of the graphics chip.

Re:Slashdot Groupthink is strange

[LWATCDR]

Funny but I almost never shop at Walmart but I don't think they are "evil". The one thing I always do go to WalMart for is compost and mulch. My local WalMart sells "Earthwise" mulch that is made locally. I know the company that makes it and it is all "earth friendly". It is real simple if you don't like them don't shop there. Frankly I only ever guy food there if it is late at night and I need something. Sort of a big Seven Eleven. I don't by cloths there because they don't last and I don't by things like Law mowers, bikes, or BBQs there because they tend to be low quality and more expensive in the long run. But I don't hate Walmart of look down on people that shop there. Frankly it is very handy to have the option of getting a new shirt, a toaster, and weeks worth of food all in one shop. It saves time and gas. If I had a few kids to deal with I might go there more often just for the convince factor.

But the difference between Walmart and Target has more to do with choice. I have a lot of Choice in where I shop. I have little choice in what OS I have to deal with. WalMart Lawn mowers don't require Walmart oil and gas to work.
Frankly this hate thing for Microsoft and or Walmart is all pretty silly. They are not the KKK or American Nazi party after all.
The real truth about Bill Gates is this.
If the Gates foundation cures Malaria then nothing that Microsoft has done in the past will matter at all. He will be remembered as a great humanitarian. I personally will still stick pins my Bill Gates voodoo doll for MFC but the rest of the world will love him for generations.

Re:Don't sell the students short

[Barny]

Yup, but do you think that I could get any mobo for an older machine to run stable for more than 1 month?

Re:Don't sell the students short

[SpecTheIntro]

If given the choice between Windows XP (any version) and Windows Vista (any version), which would you choose (if price weren't a factor)? Assuming you said Windows XP, could you give me some reasons why? Personally, I don't trust Windows Vista. I heard bad things about it, and I see no reason to abandon XP.

There really isn't any situation where Vista is preferable to XP at the moment. Vista has a lot going for it on the back-end, and it's a lot prettier than XP, but right now it's too new and requires too much computing power. I have a Vista Ultimate machine at home that I use to mess around with Windows Media Center, and this is the one area where Vista beats XP hands-down. But besides that, it's probably better to wait until Vista SP1 before you adopt it--at that point the drivers will be more more mature, it will be more stable, and the hardware required to run it smoothly will be more aggressively priced. (It really does require absurd amounts of memory for some tasks, although once it gets its caching straight, it tends to run fairly quickly.)

Re:Don't sell the students short

[aslate]

I've got Vista Business on my desktop and Vista Home Premium on my tablet PC.

Business runs perfectly fine on 1GB RAM with a P4 3.4Ghz HT, although it has a nice tenancy to load Media Player at low processor priority. I recently used the shadow-copy backup feature when i accidentally overwrote a day's work on a file with an old copy from another machine. Just select the file, view the previous versions stored and choose one to restore to. It's also running a WAMP server and various other things sit in the background.

Home Premium is running on a tablet PC with 512MB RAM and a Pentium M 1.7Ghz and integrated graphics (for which Intel aren't releasing any Vista drivers so i'm stuck with the MS ones). I've got it set to run Windows Classic theme (Vista Basic sucks and is quite a hog actually, but classic and Aero Glass seem to run ok), runs fast, has better tablet PC features than XP Tablet PC Edition and i manage to get 3.5 hours battery out of it running DivX videos still. Sometimes it'll slow down, but nothing like you're reporting.

IE7 sucks on both...

One more piece of crapware to get rid of...

[smithmc]

What would the same box cost, running $FAVORITE-LINUX-DISTRO instead of Vista? $250?

Re:Don't sell the students short

[XPulga]

OpenOffice doesn't need gobs of RAM and CPU to run. It is just slow on ANY computer. I'm an admin of a computer lab with hardware ranging from 1 GHz P3 with 512 MB to Athlon64 X2 3800+ with 4 GB RAM. OpenOffice is still slow with 4 GB of RAM, and the OO user experience is the same on the P3 and on the A64 X2.

If only Microsoft released Word 6 (hell, even Word 2) and the Windows 3.1 True Type fonts in a freeware package guaranteed to run under a stock version of Wine, OO would die within a month.

Re:Don't sell the students short

[pthor1231]

Might have something to do with me turning of the "cool" Aero features.

WalMart knows students will put MS Office on later

[cwgmpls]

Students can buy an education version of MS Office at a ridiculously low price, and many of them can get it for free from their schools that have already bought district-wides licenses for it.

WalMart knows this, so rather than pay for an MS Office or Works license when they sell the computer, they sell it without an MS office suite thereby increasing their margin. They only put OO.o on it as a filler so it has a good feature set in the newspaper ads. But I'm sure they understand that a lot of students will put MS Office on it once they get it home.

Re:Don't sell the students short

[Metaphorically]

Where did I say that most consumers should build their own? I said "I" would. And I said that students would be poorly served to get this computer.

Yes but this is VIsta basic....

[Joce640k]

Most of that extra ram is needed for the global warming inducing "Aero graphics". Take that away and 1Gb is enough.

Dell AthlonX2 $382.59 USD @ DELL

[addbo]

OK... so Dell.ca has a very decently spec'ed computer for about $100 more... (I'm sure there are similar deals in USD... it's $399 CDN... just did a quick conversion on XE.com

http://www.redflagdeals.com/deals/main.php/alldeal s/pop7days/#e26983

        * AMD Athlon 64 X2 Dual-Core Processor 4000+
        * Windows XP Professional
        * 1GB Dual Channel DDR2 SDRAM at 533MHz - 2 DIMMs
        * 160GB SATA Hard Drive (7200RPM)
        * 16x DVD+/-RW Drive
        * Microsoft Works 8
        * Integrated 7.1 Audio, Video
        * Dell USB Keyboard, Optical USB Mouse
        * 1 Year Next Business Day Onsite/In Home Service and Tech Support

I think it's worth it for $100 more... even with possible crapware... XP Pro itself is worth like $150 OEM. (I'd still rather of XP than Vista at the moment)

Re:Dell AthlonX2 $382.59 USD @ DELL

[Dzimas]

I bought one of these Dells for my wife a couple of days ago. It's absolutely perfect for what she needs. I'll install Open Office Thunderbird and Firefox for her, and forget about it. But that's about as low-end as I'd be willing to go. Saving an extra $100 at Wal-Mart to purchase a dubiously underpowered cut-rate machine seems like false economy. It'll need replacing in no time, will never give reasonably snappy performance while performing basic tasks, and is probably more failure prone because of cheap parts.

I'm waiting for the day that someone like Oprah launches a movement based on the old-fashioned idea of buying quality . It'll be the logical continuation of the anti-China backlash that seems to be catching hold in the food, tech and even auto industries in the USA.

Re:Dell AthlonX2 $382.59 USD @ DELL

[VolareMan]

The story-worthy thing is the $298 price on a usable NEW system. Yes, you can get more stuff for more money. Yes, there are cheaper refurb systems.

But $298, no crapware, with Vista, and available from walmart is an interesting story.

If only this had been released last year ...

[Skapare]

... then it would have XP instead. That would have made it an even better deal.

Re:but..

[bilabrin]

Agreed. I think we should form a gamers union or something and send a message to the developers that if they continue to develope for Windows(insert crappy OS version here)only,
we are going to abandon them.

I don't think so...

[raehl]

I think the GP is right, the kids will whine because they can't play games.

I think you mean, the can't play the latest 3D game releases.

Slip 'em a copy of DOOM. I bet even DOOM II will run great. You could probably even run Quake or Quake II on there without much trouble.

Duke Nuk'em might take forever though.

Re:Don't sell the students short

[cecille]

Exactly. For the most part, students (particularly those not in a computer-intensive field) just want something that is easy to use and works. I used to TA a intro computers course at my university. It was basically a service course for the non-CS types. Anyway, we did push these poor kids pretty hard for a 1st year service course (labs were some basic unix stuff, CPU operation, memory addressing etc.), but the time they looked the most terrified was during the last lab when we did a bit on hardware. I pulled out an fairly old and somewhat broken box, and pulled out the insides. We then handed each person a piece and told them how to figure out how to put it back together. They looked TERRIFIED, even after being told that the thing was broken (and I mean totally broken - fried hard drive and there was an incident with a screwdriver and several capacitors being flung off randomly) and likely worth less than $100, with the majority of that being the case and power supply. There is not a chance that any of those kids would have even thought to put together their own machine.

On a funny, if somewhat OT sidenote...we also got them to use OO as part of the course. Just bust it open, see what they liked and didn't and write it up in ~paragraph as a part of another assignment. Funny part was that several times I would come into the lab and see them sitting there with OO open, just staring at the screen. Of course, OO opens with a big grey screen with nothing on it (or it did at the time - haven't used it in a while). So they would assume that it wasn't done loading, or just sit there completely at a loss as to what to do with the screen they couldn't type on.

Re:Don't sell the students short

[Corporate Troll]

Sure... I still have a K6-II 333MHz that was used by my sister for years... Never a problem. My own P-I 166MHz server had uptimes of 200 days and up. Downtimes were usually due to the odd power-cut or an upgrade. I find *nice* machines in the dumpster that, after rebuilding, work without a hitch: I already have 2 AMD Athlons in the 1.xGHz range, and one P-IV 1.9GHz that was fully functional (no rebuilding needed, disks were in there, a Intel motherboard, a AGP dual-head graphics card from Matrox, additional 3Com 100Mbps NIC, 80Gig harddisk, 512Meg RAM, nice case too!)

So, yes, there is no reason why a 5 year old motherboard won't run stable. If the powersupply is still good of course.

Re:Don't sell the students short

[Bob-taro]

5. It has IE on it. The sad truth is some sites require IE to work correctly. This is changing but having IE to fall back on does make life easy. This is a little OT, and probably "preaching to the choir", but Firefox has a nice extension called "user agent switcher" to make it easy to pretend to be IE for sites that require it. I use it at work because I like FF, but many of the intranet sites just display a "designed for IE" page if you use anything else. The funny thing is, I've had no problems using FF to view those sites when FF reports itself as IE.

Re:Don't sell the students short

[John Biggabooty]

It should have come with Linux!

Again, Wal-Mart not the cheapest

[mea2214]

The Wal-Mart PR machine likes to give the illusion that they have the cheapest prices but yet again, they don't. For the past year the Microcenter by me has been selling refurbished 2.4G P4 machines loaded with XP Professional for $249. I have no interests in Microcenter other than they have a store a few blocks from me that I shop at and I like reading their monthly sale ads while sitting on the toilet. Here's a link to that PC because it's on sale again this month. http://microcenter.com/single_product_results.phtm l?product_id=0259605 They also have a refurbished Compaq for $199 (P4 1.7G) that would be good for college students too.

Re:Again, Wal-Mart not the cheapest

[Chandon Seldon]

There's a *huge* difference between a refurbished machine with an obsolete space-heater processor and a new machine with a SOTA low-energy processor. I'm not trying to defend Wal-Mart here, nor do I have anything specifically against refurbished stuff, but it's simply not an apples to apples comparison.

2GB/200GB $499 laptop Best Buy (after rebate)

[peter303]

Prices are plummeting again.
However I never trust those rebates.

Re:No Crapware?

[I'm Don Giovanni]

Huh, I was just about to post the same thing wrt the bundling of OO.o. :p

tell-me-again-why-dell-can't-do-this dept.

[starbuckr0x]

One word: Kickbacks.

Re:Don't sell the students short

[LWATCDR]

Yea but I have seem some sites that require ActiveX support. I think it may be possible to hack FireFox to use ActiveX but frankly I like to keep Firefox free of that stuff and only switch to IE when I have no choice. I feel that is the most secure way of doing things.

Re:Don't sell the students short

[Antony-Kyre]

Is there any reason whatsoever to EVENTUALLY "upgrade" from XP to Vista? I don't necessarily see the need to continuously upgrading to new operating systems as time goes by. There are no significant changes for the home computer user with newer operating systems I feel.

You call that an ancient laptop?

[canadiangoose]

I got through high school on a Tandy TRS-80 Model 102 laptop, which had a 3Mhz 8085 processor, 24k of RAM and a 40x7 character monochrome display. It was awesome, totally portable and it ran for days on a set of AA batteries.

Here's a link to a page about these amazing old laptops. http://www.old-computers.com/museum/computer.asp?c =233

I still fire it up and poke around in Microsoft BASIC every so often. Unfortunately, I no longer have a printer that accepts a parallel connection, and I never bothered to pick up a tape drive for it, so it's no longer very useful to me any more, but it's still a lot of fun.

Re:Don't sell the students short

[Gilmoure]

Darn my 800 MHz G4 iMac with 1 GB of RAM I use at home. Oh yeah, I'm a Mac user and can't play any 'cool' games. At least it works for DVD ripping, 3D modeling apps, Adobe CS2, etc. I'm such a loser with such a loser computer.

Low end for education

[MadMacSkillz]

This computer can do basic word processing and web browsing, so if that's what folks want it for, it's maybe a sellable idea. However, as earlier posters mentioned, let's remember that you get what you pay for and high quality is not going to be present from a low end box from a company like this. Also, don't forget to tack on the extra hundred bucks for el cheapo LCD display, so it's really a $400 computer, not a $300 computer.

Regarding education, it might be OK for the basic stuff but innovative teachers are going far beyond the basic word processing/web browsing thin client type stuff nowadays. I'm training a group of new teachers right now on iLife. In a fifth grade class, students can write, cast, direct, film, edit, and publish a movie on a topic they're studying to their own website on a school web server using iLife. They can compose their own soundtrack using GarageBand. They can make a podcast about the movie and put it on their website. They can take pictures of the process and make it a slideshow and publish THAT on their site. All easily possible because of iLife and the fact that today's Intel Macs have the CPU power to do all this stuff. You're not doing any of that on a cheapo PC. When kids make stuff, they learn more than just reading dry old textbooks. It's called constructivist learning. At the secondary level, the projects can and do get more in depth.

So if I'm a fifth grade teacher, I don't want one of these crap boxes. You can buy three crap boxes for the price of one iMac, but I'd rather have the iMac.

The last time I ran into trailware

[BForrester]

That's a good thing. My last computer was loaded with trailware. It was hard to get any work done, while juggling a band of unruly settlers across the country in wagons to the Pacific shore.

Too bad

[aevans]

If it did have all that junk: AOL, Norton, etc.; they could probably sell it considerably cheaper. Companies *pay* to have you put that crap on your computer. They're buying advertising.

Re:Don't sell the students short

[orkysoft]

Is there any reason whatsoever to EVENTUALLY "upgrade" from XP to Vista?

Maybe, when Microsoft stops patching XP altogether.

I don't necessarily see the need to continuously upgrading to new operating systems as time goes by.

Eventually you'll have to upgrade to a newer version, because eventually, they're going to stop providing security patches. This goes for all OS vendors. With Microsoft, you have the additional problem of them adding "features" that you won't like, such as DRM.

There are no significant changes for the home computer user with newer operating systems I feel.

I never regretted upgrading from Windows to Ubuntu, and I will upgrade to a newer version once they stop providing security patches for mine. Fortunately, they've announced for how long they will support it when they released it, so I know what to expect.

Dell low end booster procedure

[NoLongerM$Fan]

remove vista and it changes to middle of the road.

Re:Slashdot Groupthink is strange

[TheVelvetFlamebait]

Slashdot has traditionally been very libertarian and pro free market. I don't think there's much sympathy for underpaid workers and economically starved communities.

Microsoft, on the other hand, is destroying the computer world! Off with their heads! Off with their heads!

Great way to get a low power/silent computer

[doublefrost]

I've been trying to figure out a way to get a fanless computer for some time. But it always turned out to be $550+. This is actually a great way to have your own fanless computer. To make this computer silent, you'd have to replace the cpu fan with a large heatsink (like those Tunic towers) and take the fan out, and replace the PSU with either a low power fanless PSU or one of those 200W external brick PSUs. If the HD is too loud (and you don't need the HD space), replace that with a 4GB IDE flash drive. Also, I think this would make a great home server for most uses.

Re:Don't sell the students short

[jguthrie]

You know, when NeXT was building their first computer, they thought that students would need an advanced computer to do all the work they needed to do and so they came up with this $10,000 thing for students that could do everything but oral sex and sold, like, six of them to students. I was a college student at the time, and my comment was "$10,000 for a computer? For students? My car didn't cost $10,000! Most students I know are poor, and won't even consider such things." The NeXT fans assured me that their parents would be happy to pick up the check. They were wrong.

To me, it appears that WalMart understands the student market vastly better than Steve Jobs did. The price is what's important to the college student market. Capability comes in no higher than a distant second.

Re:Don't sell the students short

[diamondsw]

Solution: Pirate Windows 2000 (assuming there aren't any driver problems). After all, if you're not running games why even bother with XP?

Yeah, yeah. They could run Linux, but any recent version (i.e. that has a decently refined interface) will bog this down as well. I hate to say it, but Win2K runs circles around any Linux from the last 5 years or so. XP and Vista are a decidedly different matter, but 2K was a lean, mean OS.

I would buy one, but can't. No one can apparently

[gelfling]

It's not on their website. So when does this happen? What you can get today is an Everex GC3500 with a monitor for $348 + tax&shipping.

Re:Don't sell the students short

[lordtoran]

I have NO problem running XP media Center and OpenSuse on a system with a Gig of ram as a duel boot. I want your boot manager that lets Linux and Windows duel while they boot up. Imagine that gore and all sorts of nasty stuff covering the screen!

Nice price

[Wookietim]

And it would make a nice Linux box, but $298 isn't really the price - you have to add on the price of the monitor you have to buy, which brings it up to around $450-500.

Re:Nice price

[Lehk228]

i can get a 21" CRT from intechra for $45 http://www.intechraoutlet.com/rbwww/home/search_re sults_pc_monitors.asp?bin_id=world&page=1&Manufact urer_ID=&Monitor_Size_ID=&Speakers_Flag=&Price=&or der_by=price_current_selling_price+asc and many people already have a monitor

Re:Nice price

[RAMMS EIN]

``$298 isn't really the price - you have to add on the price of the monitor you have to buy''

Errr *beep*. If you had made that a maybe I would have agreed. Stating that one _has_ to buy a monitor is wrong, though. Many people already have monitors that they're happy with, and for some, getting the monitor included in the deal would just saddle them with a piece of junk that they would then have to get rid of. Selling computers as just the box, without any of the peripherals, is actually a good idea.

Old motherboards

[zzatz]

Old motherboards can be stable now, if they were stable when they were new. Crap, however, does not improve with age.

My router is an Abit BX6.2 with an Celeron 300A (overclocked to 450MHz) that is and always has been rock solid. Once a year I put a drop of oil on the CPU fan, and it's good for another year. Intel's 440BX was a good chipset. Maxed out at 512KB of RAM, this system runs my personal domain, providing DNS, SMTP, IMAP, SSH, HTTP/TLS, NFS, SMB, and NTP services. It's only been down for kernel upgrades, new drives, or power outages.

This Everex Via c7 system looks like a reasonable replacement. Faster, more RAM, SATA drives, and all while using less power.

I would be cautious about old motherboards from the era of counterfeit capacitors, and even those may be worth using if you know how to solder.

Re:Old motherboards

[Barny]

Hehe, the older machine I was trying to use for the router in question was a 533 celeron with an asus cusl2 mobo, but it seems the caps on said board just didn't have enough staying power.

The fact that from the time that I brought the board to the time I de-commissioned it (about 4 years) it ran 24/7 overclocking the core and overvolting what the socket could usually provide, had absolutely nothing to do with it. /sillyness off

The board I have running atm is an old abit one, they were known, in that era of dodgy caps, for having a very low amount of bad caps.

Save Those $300...

[MrCrassic]

...and get the student a used laptop off Craig's List for about $100 cheaper that has similar specs and such...

This computer is a great deal; an excellent deal for anyone with financial conservation in mind. However, there are so many used PCs (and laptops now) that will not only save you money getting, but will also be getting a computer that is more responsive and trusted (has anyone ever heard of Everex?)

Those are my two cents.

Everex rocks

[dubbayu_d_40]

The sell a kick-butt gaming laptop for under $800. I got it for less than $700 when OfficeDepot was closing them out.

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?item=N82 E16834280004

Re:please mod parent informative

[flyingfsck]

Yeah, we received about 10 machines a few weeks ago for lab use and they were all successfully decrapped in no time flat. It works like a charm.

And for $5 more, did you even read TFA?

[Provocateur]

You get to buy a CD with all the crapware!

In case you miss them, or your friends have been annoying you by bragging about all the preloaded sh*t that they got 'in a bundled package'

And an additional $5 for a recovery CD, when you've regained your sanity.

Re:Don't sell the students short

[drinkypoo]

It's not my primary machine but I have an IBM Thinkpad A21p. Mobile P3 850 MHz, 384MB, 16MB ATI Rage Mobility M3 AGP2x, 30GB disk. It's PLENTY of machine for pretty much anything but playing games, editing large (print-resolution) graphics, or doing 3d rendering. I built gentoo on it once, only took a couple days. (It took a week on the laptop I had before that, a 128MB K6/2-433. with even more ghetto ATI graphics.) And I'm not skimping either, I'm running Ubuntu Feisty in all its GNOME-ish glory. I can run scribus, the gimp, whatever, so long as I don't get crazy and try doing some big filter work (or smudges or whatever) on a 300 dpi TIFF. Frankly, any machine in the last few years is capable of providing basic computing services to almost any person for the foreseeable future. We will simply want to do more, and want more eye candy, and so it will be consider even more of a dinosaur than it already is - but it's used every day (my lady's HP P4 laptop died and this is doing the job quite nicely) and aside from some ATI and/or laptop panel annoyance (doesn't properly autodetect the video mode) it works quite well.

Re:Don't sell the students short

[drinkypoo]

I hate to say it, but Win2K runs circles around any Linux from the last 5 years or so. XP and Vista are a decidedly different matter, but 2K was a lean, mean OS.

When I run 2k I do a lot of things to speed it up. There's quite a number of unnecessary services which can be disabled (especially if you're not doing certain windows-network related things.)

But I think you are kidding only yourself, yo. If you turn things off in XP it's just as speedy as 2k. Faster, in fact, in some areas.

Also, the Linux kernel keeps getting faster and faster, with little penalty beyond additional consumption of memory. If you use an old window manager, and stay away from both GNOME and KDE apps (I would go so far as to say avoid GTK and Qt apps, but that will send you to the console a disturbing percentage of the time) then you can keep your system quite speedy - much faster, in fact, than any Windows system that will properly support the hardware (NT 3.51 supports volumes only up to 2GB and no USB, for example. Similar restrictions are upon the antique Windows 3.x.)

I do have to say that NTFS seems to be a halfway decent filesystem, I'll give them that. But NT is in general a bloated kludge collection.

Re:Don't sell the students short

[drinkypoo]

I have both virtual machines (98, 2k) and ies4linux (on wine) installed. both work very nicely, the latter uses far less memory :)

Re:Don't sell the students short

[drinkypoo]

my comment was "$10,000 for a computer? For students? My car didn't cost $10,000! Most students I know are poor, and won't even consider such things." The NeXT fans assured me that their parents would be happy to pick up the check. They were wrong.

The problem was that the people working for NeXT all had money and had forgotten what it was like not to have any.

Anyway, today people are just not going to take out a loan to buy a computer (at least, not so often) like they used to back in the Mac II days - because they can go drop $300 on a PC.

Black on purple...

[Joce640k]

"The crack here was simply copying the paper or card with the keys as well as the diskette(s), which was harder than you might imagine as photocopiers only existed at big companies and libraries."

Not only that... many were printed in black on purple paper so it wouldn't photocopy.

Has anyone gotten cash back from *mart for MS?

[zogger]

I know some folks have gotten their MS licensing fee back from other places, I am just wondering if anyone here has successfully gotten an MS license fee back from Walmart, when you say you don't agree to the terms and don't want it, but will keep the hardware? If so, would you outline the steps and what sort of check you received?

    Perhaps this fee, if it could be gotten easy, might offset filling up that one open RAM slot. The machine should be perfectly fine then. Spec wise it's better than the one I am using right now for that matter, and this machine is fine with just half a gig of RAM running linux (FC6 right now).

Re:WalMart knows students will put MS Office on la

[Lehk228]

trust me, students are cheap, and also often lazy. many will learn OOo simply because it's cheaper than buying word and works is an incompatible piece of shit

tard

[Lehk228]

refurbished, inefficient and HALF the memory. i'll take the VIA

Re:tard

[toddestan]

I have a couple of those that I have had for a while. I paid about the same price, but the ones I got came with a gig of ram, but only a DVD drive. They are whisper quiet, extremely stable and reliable, and the power management features work flawlessly. You can screw around with the VIA Wal-Mart POS special, I'll take a used corporate PC where people don't screw around with unreliable crap.

Exactly.

[crhylove]

Imagine the same machine with Ubuntu instead. Twice as fast, even cheaper, and Twice as stable and reliable. I understand they need to market the platform that most of the PC games play on, but having a box right next to it for sale that runs twice as well, and costs $50 and says "NOT FOR GAMES" on the side would probably sell very well to 70% of the people out there who don't give a shit about games.

rhY

Whoops!

[crhylove]

I meant $50 LESS. *sigh*

It costs US$ 298.00

[slocan]

Two days ago I bought a computer for my mother. They'll deliver it tomorrow. It's an upgrade from her 486DX 80MHz, with 40MB of RAM, a 1MB video card and a CD-ROM drive. It's hard disk is less than 2GB for sure (I think it's a 540MB HDD). It runs Windows 95, Word 2000 and IE.

With this equipment she browses, uses Gmail (before she used Outlook Express), and recently has begun working as a translator.

The new one comes with Linux preloaded (I'll probably install Ubuntu on it), is a Sempron 3000, has 512 MB of RAM, a 80GB HDD, a DVD-RW drive, and everything-else on-board.

Until three and a half years ago I had a 486DX4 100MHZ with 48MB of RAM, a 1MB video card and some 4GB of HD space. That took me through college, on Windows 95 and OS/2, and lately Linux (Debian then Gentoo).

Then my first upgrade was to an Athlon XP 2500+ Barton, with 512MB, a nVidia FX5200 with 128MB, 120GB HDD. That now runs Ubuntu.

How's that :-)))

Re:WalMart knows students will put MS Office on la

[INT_QRK]

Concur. I loaded OpenOffice.org on the PC's of two of my University student kids when they started (both with BSci type majors) because I didn't want to shell out extra money for MS Office, and refuse for ethical reasons to load copies of my legacy MS Office. My kids used OO with no problems or complaints over the course of their University careers. The only thing that annoys me, although they don't care one way or the other, is that when electronic submission is specified they are compelled to save out to either ".doc", ".xls," or ".ppt" proprietary MS formats. More recently (after I pointed the feature out to them), they started submitting trons in pdf format. Considering that they both attend state run schools, it bothers me that my tax dollars in effect promote Microsoft Corporation. Professors seem to now universally accept pdf, which is a good trend. I use OO almost exclusively myself now, under Gnu/Linux on my laptop, and only use MS on site at work. I do quite a bit of work from home and on travel, however, using my own laptop, and have only found an occasional need to reopen spreadsheets or presentations at work to resolve chart conversion or graphics rendering anomalies before submitting deliverable files in MS format.

Here's what the "white box" guys sell

[Master of Transhuman]

From Spectrum-Computer here in San Francisco (and there are cheaper places down the peninsula - these guys are right in town):

Intel Basic Office Workstation $249:

INTEL CELERON 331 2.66GHz 256K LGA775
Mini Case
Asus Main Board
512MB DDR2 Memory
80GB SATA 7200RPM HDD
Onboard Intel Graphics Media
Onboard Audio
Onboard LAN
16x DVD-ROM
Keyboard + Mouse

Upgrades as:
Intel Pentium4 631 3.0Ghz 2M LGA775 $289
Intel Core 2 Duo E4300 1.8GHz 800MHz 2MB LGA775 $350

Want something a little more powerful - try an AMD solution:

AMD Value and Performance 64-bit Solutions $309

AMD Sempron 3000+ 1.6GHz AM2 128K L2 Cache
Asus M2NBP-VM nVidia Quadro NVS 210S & nForce 430B AM2 Motherboard
Mid-Tower ATX Case
1G DDR2 Memory
160GB SATA2 7200RPM HDD
Onboard AMD Graphic support DVI
Onboard High Definition Sound
Onboard Gigabit LAN
16x DVD-ROM

Upgrades as:
AMD Athlon64 3500+ 2.2GHz AM2 512K L2 Cache $350
AMD Athlon64x2 3800+ 2.0GHz AM2 512K L2 Cache $399

Granted you've got to pay extra for the OS - which adds another $100-150 to the price - unless of course you put Linux on it, or already have a Windows OS license you can use. And when you buy Windows from a white box dealer, you get a full OEM install CD - none of this "recovery partition" or "Recovery CD" crap you get from the big retailers.

And Spectrum will put a diskette drive in the box so you can flash your BIOS or flash a RAID BIOS or whatever.

PCs are commodities these days. Buy them that way. Screw the big retailers - whatever you save from their more massive purchasing power and reduced prices will end up costing you later in aggravation and problems when the system fails and you find it harder to recover because of the corners they cut and the customization they did over a white box to "differentiate" themselves.

Re:Slashdot Groupthink is strange

[The One and Only]

Microsoft is offensive to people who like quality software and open standards. Wal-Mart is offensive to price-gouging small businesses and anti-trade labor unions. Can you see why maybe Slashdotters are more offended by one than the other?

Re:Don't sell the students short

[lordtoran]

Hello mods, in case your typo detectors are broken today, I am expecting to be modded funny :-)

Re:Slashdot Groupthink is strange

[mr_mischief]

I've heard all this about Wal-mart not paying shit. My cousin made a sizable down-payment on her house from cashing in just a portion of her stock options from Wal-Mart, and she has assured both of her kids that their college funds are going well.

They have been in trouble for not allowing sufficient breaks, and they have been know to cut people's ours just short of getting full-time status to avoid paying benefits. I'm not sure that in the retail job market, though, that they pay all that dismally.

Now, their environmental impact, their habit of buying Chinese goods, refusing to allow any union workers to help build their stores, and other things are all worth yelling about to various people. I'm not sure their pay ranks up there.

Re:Don't sell the students short

[Antony-Kyre]

Isn't that akin to blackmail, for if you don't pay to upgrade, you're at risk?

OT: Trans fats

[time fly]

I dislike fads as much as you do, but I don't think trans fats are one. Wikipedia confirms it:

A comprehensive review of studies of trans fats was published in 2006 in the New England Journal of Medicine that concludes that there is a strong and reliable connection between trans fat consumption and CHD.

Re:One More Question

[Corporate Troll]

Yes, but she also is my mother in law.... So I already sleep with his sister, which is a much better deal.

Re:Don't sell the students short

[orkysoft]

I didn't say it isn't. I'm pissed that they won't patch my Windows 98SE that I (rarely) use for some games.

But Microsoft has a lot of versions of Windows out, and to provide patches for all of them would probably cost too much for them. They're just a little company with little cash, and just a few employees, you know...

Re:I would buy one, but can't. No one can apparent

[bagofbeans]

Per Everex where-2-buy at http://www.everex.com/where%20to%20buy/where%20to% 20buy.htm, Wal-Mart stores carry it but walmart.com doesn't.