[GLLUG] $199 Walmart PCs

[Timothy Schmidt]

Just got finished setting up one of the now famous $199 walmart Linux
PCs for my grandmother...  I decided to write up a little message with
some interesting observations for anyone that cared.  Here goes:

I ordered one of the computers from Walmart.com (none of the walmart
stores in the area carry them in stock yet) on the 3rd of December.  The
price was $199.86, $216.14 including UPS ground shipping (as I write
this, it appears that the $199 computers have vanished from walmart's
website, to be replaces by $299 versions with more RAM and larger hard
drives  -- but you can still get to the page here:
http://www.walmart.com/catalog/product.gsp?cat=0&dept=5&product_id=2009643).  Walmart provides an on-line recipt and a simple button to click that takes you to UPSs order tracking site -- a feature I bookmarked and appreciated.  After several messages from Walmart's order fulfillment and customer service divisions apologising for a delay in shipment, it was finally shipped on the 14th and arrived in Corunna on the 19th.  Overall, Walmart did a good job of keeping me informed.

I opened the box to find a slightly smaller tower case than I had
imagined, a cheap (to be expected) keyboard, mouse and pair of
speakers.  Also included was a black power chord (the speakers have
their own built right in), a Lycoris liscense and 'backup CD', a
pre-paid label you can affix to the outside of the box to return the
computer, and a bag of manuals, CDs and such that's to be expected with
and new computer.

My first suprise upon taking a good look at everything is that the
motherboard used is Via's EPIA Mini-ITX all-in-one integrated
motherboard
(http://www.viavpsd.com/product/epia_mini_itx_spec.jsp?motherboardId=21).  We talked about these a little at the last meeting and it looks like a great little board.  It has PXE support built right in, and every single part of it worked great (and was auto-detected) when I installed Red Hat 8.0 on the computer (you didn't think I ordered it with Lycoris for my Grandmother did you?  I just wanted to liscense so I could play around with it myself!  Seriously though, Red Hat 8.0 suits her needs better, and if Walmart offered a computer with it pre-installed I would have ordered it).  Sound, Video, Networking, USB, everything worked first try.  I'm getting used to this kind of thing, but it still impresses me.

The other components used include 128Mbs of RAM (probably one stick,
haven't opened the box yet though), a 10Gb IDE hard drive (very quiet,
can't even hear seeks), a fast CD-ROM drive (56x or some such dribble),
no floppy (no big deal), an 800Mhz C3 processor (which I find to be more
than capable for surfind the internet, email, word processing, the
occasional game of Iagno, and even *gasp* watching divx movies with
MPlayer.

For the curious, the least expensive I could find the specific VIA
Mini-ITX board used on pricewatch was $114 including the 800Mhz CPU. 
Not exactly cheap compared to $34 for the CPU, and a Biostar M6VLQ which
uses the VIA Apollo Pro PLE133 chipset to get on-board Video, Audio, and
Networking for $39.

Anyway, I'm pleased with the Walmart PC and more importantly, my
grandmother is.  So while she's Mozilla'ing and OpenOffice.org'ing away
this holiday season I'll be happily un-disturbed by calls about BSODs,
hexadecimal memory address errors, crashing applications, un-cooperative
printers, etc. etc. etc.

--tim
-- 
Timothy Schmidt <tim@schmidt.is-a-geek.com>