LET?S START AT THE BEGINNING. Wal-Mart.com is now selling a computer made by Microtel which retails for $199.86. As you might expect, the computer is on the bare-bones side. Microtel also uses a new, free version of the Linux OS instead of Microsoft Windows to save money. That?s where the story gets interesting.
The operating system is called Lindows. One of its original marketing ploys was trumpeting that you could run some programs on it that only run on Microsoft Windows ? hence the name. As you might imagine, this did not make Microsoft happy. They sued. Lindows no longer touts those qualities, although the capabilities are still built inside. More about that in a minute.
The people at Lindows theorized, probably rightly so, that one of the best ways to get their software known would be to associate it with hardware that nearly everyone can afford. That is where Microtel comes in.
I?ve been testing their first effort for the past few weeks. Released a few months ago, it has an 850 MHz AMD Duron processor inside a mini-tower enclosure, 128 MB of memory, a 10 GB hard drive, a 52x CD-ROM reader, floppy drive, modem and Ethernet ports. It retailed for $299.
http://www.msnbc.com/news/813350.asp...F4114 1&cp1=1
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