Screaming Penguin - Source Does Matter

The ultra cheap Wal-Mart computers are completely incredible and deserve some praise, as opposed to the bashing that Consumer Reports gave them this month.

The machines are available at walmart.com and are VIA and AMD CPUs, some dont have floppies, and the cheapest dont have monitors. That said the one for UNDER 200 BUCKS (199) is an AMD 1.1GHZ with 128MB ram, 10GB HDD, integrated 8MB video, integrated LAN, etc. Its a real computer.

The Operating Systems choices are SuSE, Lycoris and or Lindows. I am not a huge fan of either Lycoris or Lindows, but SuSE is great stuff. At any rate its the OS that makes these computers possible at these prices. (Or you can get the same machines sans OS for the same price, not for SuSE or Lindows, but Lycoris seems to just be the same cost as no OS at walmart.com.)

Consumer reports complained that the machines cant play Windows software and cant connect to other devices such as digital cameras and recognize them automatically (my camera works great with Linux, but I did have to select it from a drop down list myself, big time technical that is). This bashing of these machines misses the fundamental points that the website STATES CLEARLY they wont run Windows software, and they were NEVER INTENDED TO.

These are machines for running office applications (with OpenOffice) and web browsing (with Mozilla). They also have instant messaging, GIMP for graphics stuff, CD burning tools, multimedia players (audio video, etc) and more. They are basics machines that do the basics very well.

What really strikes me is that organizations like Consumer Reports fail to mention that this level of a PC price empowers many more people to HAVE COMPUTERS AT ALL. This I think is a great step forward and it is at least partly BECAUSE OF the fact they dont have WINDOWS. It would be nice to see these type organizations, purportedly in place for the benefit of consumers, at least mention that no other retailer touches this price and that making computing more affordable for the masses is a GOOD THING.

Dont get me wrong, these machines are not as good as the ones that are 200 more and DO HAVE WINDOWS, but its that 200 bucks, 100% greater price than the entry one, that makes all the difference for some. Props to open source software for making computers this cheap, and props to WalMart for offering it.    Microtel PC With Lycoris OS & AMD Duron 1.1GHz - $199.98