Hello, I'm a Mac. And I'm a $248 Win8 PC. 642
theodp writes "A little birdie told me which Windows 8 machines would sell out fast. 'Cheep' ones! While no official sales figures have emerged, anecdotal evidence suggests that cheap Windows 8 laptops were a big hit with Black Friday shoppers, leaving some Walmart and Best Buy bargain hunters disappointed at missing out on the sub-$250 deals. So, was the Doctor-Desktop-and-Mister-Metro dual nature of Windows 8 and lack of a touchscreen no big deal to these bargain basement 'Laptop Hunters', or did they not realize what they were buying? Or, as a GeekWire commenter suggests, perhaps they were really just looking to score an ultra-cheap Linux laptop!"
Re:I really hope.... (Score:5, Informative)
Re:I can assure you... (Score:2, Informative)
They have no idea what they purchased, it was a cheap buy and they will be sorely disappointed when it runs like crap a year from now.
Well, Win8 is more effective than Win7 on low-end hardware (lower memory and process footprint, optimized performance), and supposedly much better at keeping system fresh, not degrading (but let's wait and see on that one). But regardless, some of these "cheap" PCs are actually impressingly powerful, compared to what a more mid-priced PC would be just a year ago. Just look at the specs linked. To get that much for that low price is impressive. It seems that the main drawback going this low on price isn't as much performance and specs, as it is bulk and weight.
Cheap? (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Cheap windows 8... (Score:5, Informative)
That's because Atoms use a licenced PowerVR graphic core from Imagination Technology that provided a binary-only linux driver, and it sucked hard.
Later kernels have the gma500 driver that provides at least basic functionality on those turds.
Let's nip this one in the bud (Score:5, Informative)
I find it interesting that this tidbit was glossed over.
However, the scene wasn’t so rosy for Microsoft at the Mall of America in Minneapolis, where analyst Gene Munster of Piper Jaffray and team observed and tabulated traffic and sales at Microsoft and Apple stores. Microsoft saw 47 percent less foot traffic than the Apple Store did, and far fewer sales — 3.5 items per hour, compared with 17.2 items per hour at the Apple Store, as reported by Fortune’s Philip Elmer-Dewitt. Most of the items purchased from the Microsoft Store were Xbox 360 games. During the two hours that the Piper Jaffray team observed the Microsoft Store, they didn’t see any Microsoft Surface tablets being purchased.
Re: I can assure you... (Score:5, Informative)
For the last 4 years or so, the viruses have been exploiting browser plugins. That would be the collective faults of Sun, Oracle, and Adobe.
Re: I can assure you... (Score:5, Informative)
Have you been surfing deviant porn sites again?
Religious sites have been serving up malware more than porn sites now.
Indeed, I belong to a financial site whose ads were serving up malware at one point. It wasn't them, but the ad service.
Your point of view is outdated.
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BMO
Re: I can assure you... (Score:5, Informative)
You are using the wrong AV then, just use what I use at the shop and give to my customers which is Comodo Internet Security Free. Its lightweight, only uses 60Mb-90Mb depending on what features you use, has by default sandboxing, and while the defaults are logical and sane you can tweak to your heart's content so you only have what you want. For example i don't IM or use download mail so those features are turned off. Its really nice and its the only one that i know of that is free for personal AND business use,they make their money on the server products and web services.
Of course anybody that got one of the BF laptops will have to clean off a Horton or mcCrappy infection, I call it an infection because frankly I've seen malware that uses less resources than those two, but once that crap is gone and a decent AV like Comodo or Avast Free (my former "go to" and still nice, just too chatty for my taste now) is put on? Well then even a netbook will purr like a kitten. Oh and i'm sure some will say "What about MSE? its super low resource!" yes it is but frankly it is really only good for geeks, as I've found that while it catches bugs in downloaded files just fine it sucks ass at drive bys. With something like Comodo or Avast you have MUCH better drive by protection as both do scan before load on web pages which MSE don't and this when combined with a low rights browser like any of the Chromium variants makes it pretty damned hard to infect Vista/7/8. In fact the last time I saw one of those pwned the user uninstalled his AV so he could install a "porn codec" which of course was just a trojan that filled the system with malware.
Trust me, I have customers that can get more viruses than a Bangkok whore on coupon day and if Comodo can survive them without letting the machine get pwned? Then it'll work for anybody.
Re:Run 98SE on that computer. (Score:5, Informative)
>7 slowed down on the first SP.
Does anyone have any objective benchmark or reference for this? This is not true at all on the 4 machines I used daily (Work PC/Home Desktop/Laptop/HTPC). The last OS that slowed down with more patches and usage was XP.
Also, XP didn't start off fast for me. It was slower than ME on the machines at the time. Of course, Vista was much more bloated in the beginning though.
Re:I can assure you... (Score:5, Informative)
It is still bloated, and it does still bluescreen. It's just that the "bluescreen" now reboots automatically instead of giving you useless error information, so it's an "improvement" of sorts. I would have made the error messages a bit more user friendly, or even rebooted the computer and then alerted the user as to why their computer rebooted... but hey, that would have been harder I guess. Windows 8 is the definition of bloated. It adds a ton of new features that make tablet use more appealing, but most people aren't running it on a tablet. Thus, you are carrying around all of this tablet crap when all you want to do is use your desktop/laptop.
Stability is far, far better than it was in the 9x series of Windows, but I can't say it really has improved tremendously over 2000, though it does seem a bit less susceptible to flaky hardware. I actually like 7 - it was a shame what they did to it in 8.