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HP Introduces Sub-$100 Windows Tablet
jfruh writes While Windows-based tablets haven't exactly set the world on fire, Microsoft hasn't given up on them, and its hardware partners haven't either. HP has announced a series of Windows tablets, with the 7-inch low-end model, the Stream 7, priced at $99. The Stream brand is also being used for low-priced laptops intended to compete with Chromebooks (which HP also sells). All are running Intel chips and full Windows, not Windows RT.
I would be interested, if I didn't have to run Windows on it.
You might want to be a bit careful, some of the ultra-cheap Windows devices are UEFI only; but 32 bit, which freaks most Linux installers out; but these are not Windows RT machines, so they will not be cryptographically locked out.
Time, and experimentation, will tell how good compatibility actually is; but it should be markedly easier than any Windows RT device, and honestly quite probably easier than doing a Linux port to a lot of common Android devices(yes, bodging a headless debian userland or something onto an Android system is easy; but getting X, using a mainline kernel, or not using bionic, less so...)
The new Stream laptops by default have no touchscreen
I wanted one, until I read this part. Could you really consider it a tablet if you have to plug a mouse in for it to work?
HP is using the Stream brand for both laptops and tablets.
Windows is free to OEMs for devices with smaller than 9" screens.
That's not the issue: Since virtually all (x86) systems built later than 2010 are 64-bit, the expected case is 64 bit UEFI. Contemporary linux distributions don't even bat an eye at booting on a 64-bit system with 64-bit UEFI (well, there are a lot of ugly details under the surface, probably enough to keep several devs more or less permanently alcoholic; but the user doesn't need to see that).
However, there are a few edge cases that really haven't gotten enough attention and/or love to smooth them over: Apple has some older models with 32-bit EFI, and 64-bit CPUs, that are a bit weird, and there was a period where MS/Intel was using 32-bit Atom processors, with UEFI and no BIOS fallback, in order to hit aggressive price points for 'win-tablet' systems. These are a huge pain to boot to anything except the OS they were designed for; because distributions with good UEFI support almost always expect 64-bit CPUs, and 32-bit distros almost always expect BIOS booting.
There may be others; but the 'clover trail' based hardware that uses Z2760 or similar atom processors is what I'm talking about.
Troll much?
I love it for its speed of boot-up, and shutdown
That is because it goes into hibernation. They cheat because they can't get it to shutdown or boot from a cold start faster than a Chromebook, even on superior hardware.
Except that laptops are hibernated, not shut down in most usage scenarios.
But well shilled.
Booting 32 bit UEFI on a 64 bit CPU has been fixed in kernel 3.15. http://kernelnewbies.org/Linux...