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HisTech : History of Technology of interest to Al Macintyre

Updated: 10/01/2002; 1:15:50 PM.

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Friday, September 27, 2002

Gary Krakow of [MSNBC] reviews the $200.00 AOL Lindows PC, selling at Wal-Mart.com in which Gary labels this as a very promising work in process, in which it remains to be seen if the Linux community embraces this product that is in bed with AOL. The $200.00 price tag might be just right for people who want to experiment with what can be done outside the Microsoft world, but are not ready to experiment on their primary computer.

The product is on the bare-bones side, using a free version of Linux OS which they used to say did everything Microsoft Windows does and more, until Microsoft sued to make them stop saying that, but Microsoft was unable to stop them from providing more than Windows provides.

Gary Krakow tested this assertion by installing his Microsoft Office 2000 onto Lindows 2.0 ... a PC that did NOT have any version of Microsoft Windows there, but Office 2000 ran flawlessly.
Apparently many Microsoft products work fine, and some do not work properly, but hey that is just like the real Windows environment.

If you have not purchased a PC recently, this could be more than you now have.

800 Mhx C3 chip (Cyrix) Energy Star certified
128 Meg of Ram (expandable to 1 Gig)
10 Gig hard drive
52x CD-Rom
10/100 Ethernet connection (modem is $30.00 more)
keyboard
2 button wheel mouse
pair of speakers

For $100.00 more (price goes up from $199.86 to $299.--) you can get Microsoft Windows on it, but you do not need Microsoft Windows to do all AOL stuff, use the new Netscape, Instant Messaging, e-mail. Some tweaking required to make this more user-friendly.
For $99.00 per year you can download any additional software from the Lindows web site (1,300 titles offered) and for a limited time, that buys you and extra year of this.

For example, Sun's StarOffice suite is a cheaper alternative to Microsoft Office, that normally retails for $75.00 so it is a great deal that is one of the 1,300 offerings.

Al thanks V. of TYR for bringing this story to my attention.

2:33:10 PM