PC Magazine reviews the $159 Linspire box sold at Fry's

[Patrick]

http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,1895,1932801,00.asp

[shopRatt]

I think this is great. It gives a larger group of people the opportunity to get a pc at a very cheap price. I know of some families that could barely scrape up the money to buy one of these, but it would be very beneficial to them when they did. Many places are closing up and money is tight. They have no shot at getting a regular priced pc, however this would be good for Web browsing and getting email. Today all children need access to a computer to stay competitive at school. My daugher has one report due every month in the 5th grade, and uses the Internet to find content much quicker than through books and magazines.

Also, it is a plus that it uses a flavor of Linux because it opens up a whole new group to try out the OS. As they get more proficient, they can download other distros. I just hope that this setup has plenty of documentation and support, because since it is Linux, the pool of knowledgeable people around for support will be significantly less. If it does not have much support, it will get a bad reputation.

[snarkout]

Yeah, and meanwhile Linc is hoarding all the old P2s

[Tsuroerusu]

I know of some families that could barely scrape up the money to buy one of these, but it would be very beneficial to them when they did. Many places are closing up and money is tight. They have no shot at getting a regular priced pc, however this would be good for Web browsing and getting email.

Dude, for families like that I almost just wanna give them a computer because I feel sorry for them, you can actually find some decent parts these days for 70 bucks and make something very good: nForce2 motherboard, AMD Athlon CPU, 512 MB of RAM, Geforce4 MX card.

I really don't understand why there isn't a 99 dollar PC yet, when I hear about families not even being able to afford technology I get mad at the people who throw perfectly good machines out because it's loaded with spyware, I tell ya, if a kid could get one of those for free, he would just sit down and fix it, and if he didn't know how to, he would sit down and learn (fdisk /dev/hda --> d --> 1 --> w <--- That's all).

Today all children need access to a computer to stay competitive at school.

Computers are a good thing for kids anyway.

My daugher has one report due every month in the 5th grade, and uses the Internet to find content much quicker than through books and magazines.

Dude, printed word book are the biggest freaking pain in the ass, I was close to using one for toilet paper last week when I ran short on it.

[johnnywtllts]

After adding the $40 worth of RAM and a then a monitor - a couple of others come to mind ---- compare (if you wanted to wipe Windows and give it to somebody)- Dell's 299.00 after rebate w/monitor and double the RAM
http://www1.us.dell.com/content/product ... ~pbar=true

-and the 300.00 Ubuntu "Lean Machine" Maximum PC built in the Oct 2005 issue (I'll have to get home to see what the exact specs were on it - but they usually build a decent machine).

[johnnywtllts]

My bad, that was the Jan 06 issue. Sempron 2800+, 80GB drive, 512MB RAM.