Madshrimps Forum Madness - A Review of the $200 Wal-Mart Linux PC

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A Review of the $200 Wal-Mart Linux PC

It was time to buy my daughter a cheap Linux system to be used for schoolwork and playing flash games — well, mostly for playing flash games. In the past, I've bought the $200 Great Quality boxes at Fry's, and they've proved very reliable, but the salesman at Fry's told me that they were no longer carrying them, so in search of my cheap Linux fix, I decided to buy the new Everex TC2502 Green gPC being sold at WalMart. Er, supposedly being sold at WalMart. WalMart has sold Linux PCs in the past, but what was supposed to be different about this one was that it was going to be available on the shelf in stores, not just by mail order. However, a bit of searching in the WalMart web site showed that the machine wasn't really in stock at any of the stores that were listed as having it. What was in stock was the GC3500, a $300 model that comes with Windows Vista preinstalled. (Since then, Everex has lined up a bunch of other distributors; since I'm not a big fan of WalMart, I'd probably use one of them if I was doing this over.) I ended up ordering the $200 machine I wanted via WalMart's "Site to Store" service, where they ship it to the local store (at no extra charge), and send you an email when it's arrived so you can come and pick it up. The price was $199, plus tax. A monitor and wifi card basically doubled the price.

http://www.lightandmatter.com/article/gos_review.html

and interesting discussion on the topic: http://linux.slashdot.org/article.pl...41205&from=rss

Quote:

I have been waiting many years for Linux to get to a point where I could dump Windows. Well, I installed Ubuntu just a couple of weeks ago and was extremely impressed. Over the years, I have gone from somewhat of a power user to doing little more than surfing the web and doing e-mail, so it should be perfect for me, right? Over this weekend, I really got to start using the Ubuntu system. The very fist issue I ran into was the Evolution address book wouldn't display contacts you added...if you could get them to even add. I researched the problem and found people describing the exact same problem, in forums dated 2005. The next thing I wanted to do is search and replace some hard returns in OpenOffice's word processor. You can do it to some degree, but you have to search the web for an explanation on how to do it. In the end, it wouldn't work properly, and I had to transfer the file to my Windows system and do it on Word, which just has a menu option to search for special characters (really cool that Ubuntu saw my Window's share and I could just transfer the files over the network). Also, someone said that you could add Flash just by going to a web site that required it and clicking on "add plugin." Well, I tried that, and I had to manually install it, myself...it wasn't hard, but it took me about 15 - 30 minutes of reading some "how to" forums before I got it installed.

All in all, it is hard to complain about something that is free, and I totally plan on continuing my move away from Windows. But I think anyone would be pretty darn hard pressed not to say that Ubuntu doesn't have some rough edges.

One really nice advantage I see, too, is that it sure if nice not to have my hard drive constantly thrashing from all of virus scanners, spyware scanners, etc., running in the background!