Hello, I'm a Mac. And I'm a $248 Win8 PC.

theodp writes "A little birdie told me which Windows 8 machines would sell out fast. 'Cheep' ones! While no official sales figures have emerged, anecdotal evidence suggests that cheap Windows 8 laptops were a big hit with Black Friday shoppers, leaving some Walmart and Best Buy bargain hunters disappointed at missing out on the sub-$250 deals. So, was the Doctor-Desktop-and-Mister-Metro dual nature of Windows 8 and lack of a touchscreen no big deal to these bargain basement 'Laptop Hunters', or did they not realize what they were buying? Or, as a GeekWire commenter suggests, perhaps they were really just looking to score an ultra-cheap Linux laptop!"

Comments

Re:I really hope....

[hairyfeet]

Congrats, you chose...wisely. The ONE place where Win 8 is actually better than Win 7 IMHO is on HTPCs, the metro UI gives you nice big targets to hit and makes the perfect 10 foot UI. That is why i say "its all about choosing the right tool for the job" because even Win 8 has a place its good and that is HTPC.

If you hadn't already gone with Win 8 I would have actually recommended a version of Linux, specifically OpenELEC as they have pre-built versions for the various chips including Atom, is really light on resources, and has XBMC for its 10 foot UI. So if you get tired of Win 8 or just want to try something new give it a shot, it even works well with more wireless remotes.

As for running a VM? Frankly nothing beats the pirate versions of Windows called "Tiny windows" as they have stripped ALL the bullshit to make Windows as light as possible while still running a good 95%+ of the software. it was originally cooked up by gamers who wanted an ultra stripped down windows so they'd have more resources for their games but it also kicks ass in VMs. Their version of XP only uses 67Mb of RAM fully patched, their version of 2K3 86Mb, Win 7 around 130Mb, and they even managed to get Vista down to 385Mb of RAM. Hey they are tweakers not miracle workers. But all you have to do is swap their cracked key with your own and voila! A legal copy of Windows that has already been pre-tweaked for VM usage. Frankly MSFT really ought to hire the guy that makes 'em, I put TinyXP against embedded XP and winFLP and it curbstomped both when it came to resource usage, which is why the Tiny versions make great VMs.