Somebody finally reviewed those microtel wal-mart PCs. I was looking forward to this as I still remember how annoyed I was when I tried a beta version.
For this review, Microtel provided us with a AMD Duron 850 MHz system, with 10 GB Maxtor hard drive, 128 MB of memory, and 52x Samsung CDROM drive. Sound and video are integrated on the motherboard. Sound is supported through the VIA chipset, while the Trident Cyber Blade video shares main memory to do its tasks. The modem is a 56K Lucent software modem, but LindowsOS already has the appropriate driver installed. Absent from the system is a floppy drive, which I suppose is less than useful for a system that will upgrade its software from the Internet.
No floppy drive? Man, that sucks. I don't care where the software comes from but floppy drives are universal, I would never want a computer without one.
Surprisingly, the basic LindowsOS fits in a mere 450 MB on the disk. It features a KDE desktop with a selection of icons and menus which should make most Windows users feel right at home. Icons are activated via a double-click, which was peculiar to me as a Linux user, but this action should feel comfortable for most of the intended buyers of this system
Just confirms that Lindows is just a rip off of windows mixed with a bad linux distro.
So far, very nice. But then X Windows came up. Unfortunately, the monitor I normally use for testing is not a multisync monitor. This apparently was a problem for the system as configured. As a result, the screen became entirely unreadable. Faced with this, I decided to do what any novice user would do: I powered the machine off. Yes, I could have gone to one of the text consoles, logged in as root, and issued the shutdown command, but very few Wal-Mart buyers would know about that
I wonder why that is. Can anybody shed some light on that? I don't normally use one myself.
I try a fourth package, only to find that my Click-N-Run test has now expired. I have had my three free test downloads (even though two failed) and now I will have to pay $99 to get full access to the Click-N-Run software warehouse.
Considering people have to pay $99 for full access to click-n-run it seems like a rip off if you have to constantly keep try to download software. Seems like a hassle.
Oh no ... a rescue CD
Enough said. The rest of the article can be located here http://newsforge.com/newsforge/02/07...4.shtml?tid=23