New Laptop for under $500

Tyler · 2004-12-22T22:32:32-06:00 (Wednesday)

Walmart is offering a laptop running Linux for under $500. The specs aren't too bad AMD 1.1Ghz, 40Gb hd, DVD-ROM. If I had $500 I'd probably be able to afford a laptop now.

It really makes me wonder how much the price is bloated for things like Windows and Office.

William Grim · 2004-12-23T06:02:25-06:00 (Thursday)

These are showcased in the store?

Selling them online isn't as cool.

Michael Kennedy · 2004-12-24T17:01:53-06:00 (Friday)

i'm not sure if they're in stores yet, but they should be soon. right next to the linspire PCs as well. so if you have a Walmart that sells the PCs, youshould also have one that sells the laptops.

does the walmart in eville sell PCs? i havent ever really looked or noticed.

John Eachus · 2004-12-29T08:22:29-06:00 (Wednesday)

tfizzle,
An OEM Windows XP home costs us about $90 and XP office is around $290. If you buy larger license packs the price is reduced but not by too much. If you're Dell or Wal-Mart you can purchase them by the thousands and get a descent price but for the rest of us it's outrageous.
You can put Linux on almost anything so don't short change yourself on hardware just to get Linux pre-loaded. I have a copy of RedHat 9 that works like a champ, and I'd be glad to help out anyone who is having problems.

William Grim · 2004-12-29T09:27:33-06:00 (Wednesday)

Yeah, and FreeBSD would like mighty nice on some high quality hardware as well. :-D

If you have a spare box lying around, you can use it as the package cache, where you store the packages you have built so that upon next reinstall of FreeBSD, you don't have to rebuild all your packages, like OpenOffice or KDE/Gnome (if you use those). Say good bye to the argument of long compile times then... well, mostly.

Hmm, I guess I was sorta off topic, but we're talking about Unix a bit so hey.

Stiffler · 2004-12-29T10:53:10-06:00 (Wednesday)

Or, if you don't have a spare box, you can bur prebuilt stuff off to CDR/DVDR. Granted. You don't have the same amount of storage space, but CDs are dirt cheap now-a-days. Heck, even DVD-Rs are really cheap along with the burners. If you cannot add a burner drive, the nixes and bsds support external USB drives, even USB 2.0 ones.

When the packages get aniquated, have a little fun with the CD. :D

John Eachus · 2004-12-29T12:20:52-06:00 (Wednesday)

http://apache.airnet.com.au/~fastinfo/microwave/cd/

Just one application for unwanted CD's.