---------- Forwarded message ---------- From: Daniel Ajoy Date: 08-nov-2005 15:22 Subject: [Latinoamerica] very good impressions of $99 ubuntu computer To: Latinoamerica AT aprendelibre.net Date: Wed, 2 Nov 2005 19:52:02 -0500 From: Phil Shapiro <pshapiro at his.com> Subject: [DDN] very good impressions of $99 ubuntu computer hi everyone - yesterday and today i've been trying out the $99 ubuntu linux computer (dell optiplex gx1 -- 600 MHz) being sold for $99 from pcretro.com, a mail-order company in the washington dc area. this is one very sweet computer. it surfs plenty fast on the web using firefox. i have a slow cable modem connection at my apartment that is equivalent to a 768 kbps dsl connection. when i go to a web site, there's a pause for 2 or 3 seconds, and then the web page loads quite rapidly. scrolling thru long word processing documents is fast. (i.e. almost no noticeably delay in scrolling thru a 100 page word processing document.) applications launch relatively quickly. this computer boots faster than my new pentium 4 windows xp system. for word processing and web surfing, this is a very usable computer. with both firefox and openoffice.org writer programs loaded in memory, i was using 121 megabytes of 251 available megabytes in RAM. that leaves ample free memory for running one or two more applications concurrently. the 20 gigabyte hard drive on this computer has 15 gigabytes free. if this computer had itunes for linux installed on it, i'd be in heaven. (apple has not announced such a program, but wishful thinking sometimes produces results.) the version of ubuntu on this computer is version 4.10, from late 2004. presumably newer versions of ubuntu would work even better. i'm really pleased this computer is available to community members at such an affordable price. the small size of this computer is also impressive. it's barely wider than a foot ruler. (it's 12.5 inches wide and 14.9 inches deep.) i'll be writing up a more detailed review that will include some photos and videos. just wanted to share this info early in case it could benefit any of you. for families that have the new $15/month dsl service from verizon or sbc, this would make an ideal extra computer to have in the house. (or it could function well as a person's only computer, too.) this computer has a built-in ethernet port, so it could share a high-speed internet connection using an ethernet hub or switch. - phil ***************************** OpenWorld Learning http://www.openworldlearning.org _______________________________________________ Latinoamerica mailing list [email protected] http://aprendelibre.net/mailman/listinfo/latinoamerica_aprendelibre.net -- Alejandro Rene "El Corrector Empedernido" Fernandez Blanco Miembro de PLUG (Argentina). www.plug.org.ar Petitorio contra el Programa de Malversacion miPC http://www.petitiononline.com/noamipc1/ Coordinador General del I FLISOL La Plata http://installfest.net/2005/lugares/ar/laplata