new pc at wal-mart

[Captain_Rush]

[i]posted 8:03am EST Mon Feb 25 2002 - submitted by Roman <! -- news item -->

NEWS
Walmart.com has announced that it will begin selling a line of PCs without an operating system. The move is being made as an attempt to grab marketshare of the more advanced technical users. Walmart.com is using the new line as a test to gauge demand by the tech-savvy public.

Walmart.com is selling Microtel PCs for prices ranging from US$399 to around $870. None of the PCs ship with the most common desktop operating system, Microsoft Windows, or a monitor. Critics of the move believe that the OS-free PCs could confuse average consumers into believing that they are purchasing a plug-and-play type solution.

Users will be required to purchase an operating system individually, or obtain a free OS such as Linux.

Read more at CNET.

being board i found an old artical on a wal-mart pc, it just caugt my eye

[/i]

[Weltall]

I remember about that, but the idea never caught on. We only sold them for about a month. They ended up being marketed as emailing machines.

[Dark Jaguar]

Well of course it didn't catch on. :D The tech savvies could just remove the OS on their own on a system that comes with one already anyway. Well, I suppose the price would be lowered...

Anyway, I think the main problem is people like me tend to just buy the parts individually to get a computer that does pretty much exactly what I want, and usually it costs less too.

[A Black Falcon]

Weird, PC without an OS? Yeah, not surprised that the idea didn't work, it doesn't seem like a very good one...

[Dark Lord Neo]

I've only ever seen a pc in a Canadian wal-mart once. For some reason they don't seem to sell them here.

[Great Rumbler]

It's actually not that hard to remove the OS from a regular computer. You just run a sweep of your harddrive and when it restarts, just pop in the disk of the OS you want and it'll install. Easy as that.

[Dark Jaguar]

It's not always THAT easy. That only works if the os you want to install has a boot disk. Sometimes you have to install some basic OS like DOS or something and browse to the disk, where you can then run an installation program. Not all linux distributions, for example, have boot disks.

[Dark Lord Neo]

It's not always THAT easy. That only works if the os you want to install has a boot disk. Sometimes you have to install some basic OS like DOS or something and browse to the disk, where you can then run an installation program. Not all linux distributions, for example, have boot disks.

It's usually fairly easy to just make a boot disk even if the distribution doesn't come with one.