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A Review of the $200 Wal-Mart Linux PC

Posted by kdawson on from the green-around-the-edges dept.

bcrowell writes "Wal-Mart's new $200 Linux PC has generated a lot of buzz in geek circles. Although they're sold out of stores, I bought one for my daughter via mail order, and have written up a review of the system. The hardware seems fine for anyone but a hardcore gamer, but the pre-installed gOS flavor of Ubuntu has a lot of rough edges."

4 of 235 comments (clear)

  1. Hardcore gamer? by Poromenos1 · · Score: 5, Insightful

    It would appear that there are two kinds of PC users, hardcore gamers and normal people. Not so, there are also people who enjoy an occasional game of HL2 or people who work with huge amounts of data or who run extensive calculations on their PCs (or hell, even Photoshop). Lumping PCs into two categories, "Bleeding edge, $2000 PC" and "Everything else" isn't that informative. Maybe he should have said "very good for the average user (web browsing, flash games, office suites)", which I don't doubt it is (average users require fewer resources than even today's cheapest PCs have).

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  2. Unprofessional Review by ozmanjusri · · Score: 5, Insightful
    Reading that, you begin to understand why professionals get paid to review products.

    It's full of inconsistencies;

    • The guy claims to be experienced with Ubuntu, but didn't know to type his user password at the sudo prompt.
    • He manually installs the Flash plugin and calls it unintuitive, when all you need to do is go to a website with Flash content, and it'll automatically install for you.
    • He can't find the "log out" menu item...
    • He thought installing Gnome would fix a network problem.
    And so it goes on. There's almost no real review of what's installed, how easy it is to use, or even how to solve the problems he encounters.

    About the only thing you learn from him is that a little knowledge is dangerous.

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    1. Re:Unprofessional Review by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

      If the reviewer didn't know and couldn't work it out, how is anybody buying it expected to know?

  3. 512M of ram? by www.sorehands.com · · Score: 5, Insightful

    It is cheap to add another 1GB of ram. Most users want to be able to run a word processor, look at pictures, and surf the internet.

    Most of the stores just keep pushing faster and faster machines on people, more than what they need. Vista helps with that being such a pig.

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