On 22/05/11 11:28, Martin Houston wrote:
I was at OpenTech yesterday and there was a massive computer fair
going on at ULU at the same time.
There were many people selling ex corporate PCs (mostly Dells and HPs)
for prices that looked better value than the Race Online Scheme!
not at all surprised, however the raceonline scheme is not about getting
the cheapest possible computers, it is about getting cheap computers to
the widest number of people, or getting the widest number of people
online. It isn't all about the price and they have additional costs.
Also ULU or tottenham court road is not a convenient place to get a
computer for a large portion of the non-online population
A typical example was a dual core desktop with 1G ram and 80G hard
disk for 79 quid with flat screen monitors going for 30-40 quid on top
of this.
Yes no delivery, no after sales support but a lot more computer for
the money!
All these machines came with a basic install of XP only. I asked one
of the vendors why they did not offer Linux as well. He was interested
in the prospect of appealing to a wider audience with his reconed PCs.
I found out that the image the fresh XP install onto PCs over the
gigabit network that is standard in ex business PCs of the age that
are available at the moment.
He said that getting a fresh XP image onto a pepurposed machine this
way takes just 4 minutes!
yeah, you can drop an Ubuntu image on disk pretty quick too. I had them
cloning with a PXE boot and clonezilla image drop in 9 minutes on some
pretty slow hardware over 100mbit networking. I can see this getting
down to 4 minutes on the hardware they are talking about.
Alan.
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