Asus to offer Linux-less Eee PCs globally

Asus has formally announced it will begin offering outside of Japan its tiny Eee PC laptop with Windows XP pre-installed in place of the Linux distro it's offered to date. That's not to say the Eee will not ship with Linux. While Asus was a little vague on the matter, it's likely it will offer the Eee in multiple forms, some …

[Anonymous Coward]

Bet they're not paying full price

I bet they're not paying full OEM price for XP. Microsoft must have shat their pants seeing a neat small footprint laptop with office apps on it for that price.

Worse still when they couldn't diss it as a toy as it worked well and sold well. Then things were getting even worse, competitors were copying it, and planning cheap home PCs!

I'm guessing if you dig into it, you'll find MS may even be paying Asus for XP on that box in some complicated subsidy deal, just to undermine the market for all those linux competitors coming out.

[horrors of tesco]

Why always that image?

Please reg, stop using that same shopped image of the girl on the beach, please show the average user of an Eeeeeeeeeeeee PC:

Middle-aged, balding, overweight womaniser.

[jubtastic1]

No Linux

And I won't be buying one.

Anyone want to take a bet that if they sell XP and Linux versions they will be priced the same or the linux version will cost a little bit more/have degraded hardware specs.

You can't beat free*

*Does not apply to Microsoft.

[Cameron Colley]

The bastards.

I know they're only doing it because the market will demand it, and that companies exist for profit -- but I'm still disappointed to see that mainstream Linux adoption is likely to decline when things were starting to look up.

[Luke Wells]

Superb

So if you want a compact, low cost laptop with an efficient operating system.... you could buy the Err PC

If you don't like efficent operating systems and low cost, soon you will be able to buy the XP version.

Excellent! So when can you buy the Vista version.... for users who really want their Eee PC's to run slow (and cost more)

[jon battle]

Where do Asus engineers get their drugs from?

If they just exposed 2 SODIMMs for customer to fill as he likes, the how-much-RAM saga goes away. If they just exposed an SD socket for the customer to fill as he likes, the how-much-silicon-drive saga goes away. Then they could concentrate on making and selling computers. I happen to need 4G RAM, the next guy might want 1G. Why should Asus care? Likewise the silicon-HD. Just sell us a box, you idiots.

- The same applies to the OS. I want linux, I neither know nor care who wants windoze- just stick in whichever you need.

[Ralphe Neill]

Sigh ...

I suppose it had to happen. Let us just hope that Asus doesn't make Linux the second-best option!

[Anonymous Coward]

What about the Windows key?

Well, will it have one (or two)?

[Anonymous Coward]

"If they just exposed an SD socket"

Good thing they have, all along, then.

[cor]

Sellout

Ah, so they saw penguins in Redmond...

Can't be having that commie OS being delivered mainstream...

I know from experience that WinCE licenses cost more than desktop, so MS is prolly subsidising the insertion of its bloatware.

Ironic, so soon after the final demise of Netscape, that MS adopts its 'IE uber alles' tactic once again.

[Stuart Harrison]

Sounds good to me

As keen as I am on open source technology, I'm now tempted to buy an Eeeeeeee, as a DJ I use timecoded vinyl to play digital stuff live, and am in the market for a cheap low spec PC for when I play out. There's currently no Linux-based software that meets my needs, so this might be just what I'm looking for!

[jon battle]

Anon, do the SODIMMs upgrade to 4G? Really?

- if it does, thanks for telling me what the specs I saw didn't.

- svp the URL thanks

[Highlander]

Interesting

Asus have done something that might be considered significant.

When was the last time that a motherboard maker or generic box maker was able to call the shots with Microsoft? Do you really think Microsoft saw the Eee PC and thought that their chums at Intel and HP and Dell would be delighted by the prospect of these things running Windows? So then, the sight of a sub compact notebook running Linux being a success in the market made their head snap round. Suddenly that 'soon to be end of line' product XP is available on the Eee PC. Think perhaps XP is not so soon to be end of line? Microsoft certainly had to do something or else see potentially millions of young and geeky users using Linux daily.

Actually, this thing running XP might be a very good value prospect, and decently functional to boot.

Paris, because we need a shop'd image of a gold encrusted Paris with an Eee PC.

[hypernoob]

RM have them down for 28th April

http://www.rm.com/Secondary/Products/Product.asp?cref=PD1030046

RM have them down for April 28th

[J]

Interesting...

"So it's interesting that this week's announcement centres not on Vista but its predecessor."

Interesting but hardly surprising. I've heard you need some 10 GB of disk space just for Vista (is that right?)... If they are gonna trim it so radically, just go with XP anyway... Either way, I wouldn't consider buying it with Windows at all.

[Leona]

XP On 4Gb ya right

So they've managed to stuff XP into a 4gb packages, they must have left a lot of stuff out, M$ bloatware normally will not fit on a 10gb partition let along a 4gb drive!

Shame I thought Asus would be the first manufacture to stand up to M$ and say we're not having that $h1te on our computer! These machine seem still very few and far between in the UK, not seen any with the colour choices, only white, sill looking forward to the 2nd gen models.

[Steven Hewittt]

RE: Highlander

Um, maybe Asus wanted to provide their new toy with the worlds most popular desktop operating system on it as the Linux ones were only being brought by a few cutting-edge educational places and geeks....?

XP Home OEM is £50 through a retailer for your average Joe. If your buying it from MS on that sort of scale then the price would probably be in the region of £20-30 per licence. If that.

More than likely MS aren't making a profit on it, but I doubt it's free to Asus either.

[Pete Smith]

Screen

Go on ASUS, give us a hi-res screen.

480 vertical pixels is NOT enough!

[Rick Brasche]

@ Tony

they might not be paying full price for XP on these, but you can bet good money that they'll be *charging* for this OS offering.

[storng.bare.durid]

This is welcome news... perhaps...

One good thing this offers the end user is choice

... although I'd be pretty bummed if and when I go get my bigger screen eee when it comes out by the end of the year I have to have xp on it. I would hate to have to pay a premium for stuff I do not want.

I wonder how they're gonna ship these things... xp box, xandros box... Hopefully they'll always have stock of the xandros ones lol

[Michael]

who cares

I'm writing this on my eeeeeeeeeee. I don't care that they are selling an XP version. So long as I can get the next version pre-installed with linux at a lower cost.

Asus are simply being sensible, people want windows. Why? Because they don't know better. My 4 year old cousin can use my eee perfectly. His mother struggled because it wasn't Windows and the icons are different. If asus have got M$ to bend over to get XP on the EEE then well done to them. It is about bloody time a manufacturer managed that. Failing that, I hope Asus are passing on the cost so people can see the extortionate amount that M$ products cost.

[spegru]

Boobytrab?

I can see an msft strategy that uses xp (and therefore xp continues for the foreseeable future) to try keep linux out of the market.

However they are then at risk of two things: Being accused of price dumping by the EU, and undermining sales of vista.

BTW did anyone notice the bundling of MSWorks rather than openoffice

Seems msft want to eat their own babies!

[Trygve Henriksen]

What the market demands...

I'll tell you all what the market demands...

That they stop horsing around and SHIP ME THAT 4GB 'Galaxy Black' I ordered almost 2 months ago...

(Ordered from Clove.co.uk in January)

Should probably have ordered it on eBay, but with the recent asshattery there...

(I wonder how all the sellers there seems to be able to get hold of as many Eee's as they want while more traditional stores can't get any, at least of the 4 or 8GB models.)

Paris Hilton because it would look sey in her hands...

[Anonymous Coward]

xp paging vs solid state?

anyone want to make bet on how long its takes xp's uncontrollable reading and writing of registry keys for no apparent reason and writing to the page file to totally bugger up the non-replacable solid state drive?

if you don't believe me about the registry leave sysinternals process monitor running wit your pc sat idle..

[Anonymous Coward]

dinnae forget the kool-aid drinkers!

apparently it's also possible [with a bit of hackery poker] to run mac OSX on the asus:

http://uneasysilence.com/archive/2007/11/12654/

woohoo!

[Jay Zelos]

great excuse

Do you get points for each copy of *that* image that's published. Or is this some kind of scam to reduce bandwidth by reusing a previously browser cached image repeatedly.

Jay

[spegru]

Where to get your eee

PC world!

Piles of em...........

Maybe that's why clove etc can't get enough

[Trygve Henriksen]

@spegru: PC World...

Yeah, right...

PC World only ships to the UK, which means it's no use for me(I live in Norway)

Besides, their online store only has the 2GB white in stock(the 4GB model is sold out) and it's more expensive than at Clove...

The Eee is supposed to arrive at the Norwegian imported sometime in April, but the rumour now is that we won't get it. We may get the 8.9" model sometime later this year...

And not only Norway, but that goes for the rest of Scandinavia, too.

[Andy Worth]

Re:XP On 4Gb ya right

I don't know where you get your "facts" from, but XP will quite happily fit into a 4GB partition along with Office and some small basic apps (like Adobe Reader for example). Of course, you won't have much room for anything else, but then it's not designed for gaming or file storage is it?

Of course, it WILL probably completely screw itself over within weeks if you actually use it, just because of all the nice space that XP consumes over the time you use it, unless you stay on top of "clean-up" type maintenance.

[Kevin Pollock]

Re: Where to get your eee

Still waiting for my daughter's Eee to arrive. On order for a month now.

Went straight to the PC World web site after reading your post - they have 2G versions (which are obviously out of fashion already) but no 4Gs.

Where are you seeing "piles of them"???

[David Gosnell]

@ Andy Worth

Quite. I've got full XP Pro on a 6GB (5.5GB formatted) partition, with a reasonable page file, OpenOffice, XAMPP server stack, several hefty websites and a few other bits and bobs. Still 2.5GB to spare. 4GB would be a tighter squeeze, but still perfectly doable.

[John]

XP won't fit on 4GB

I know, I just reinstalled XP home on my PC. After the install I removed as much bloat as I could - outlook express and friends. That took up 3GB. Then I did the painfully slow update process and after countless reboots and several hours XP home was munching up 5.5GB of disk space.

I would like to say that it is significantly slower after all the updates than it was when freshly installed. However it is way better than it was before the reinstall.

No way will XP fit on an eeeeeeee, Linux all the way.

[Leona]

Re: Re:XP On 4Gb ya right

Hi Andy, well yes that was the point I was trying to make, so you 'could' install XP, but that would be it, as you'd not be able to install anything else. Its from experience of trying to install XP on small drives, I found anything smaller than 10Gb and your wasting your time with M$ (unless you use 95/98/SE).

And as others have mentioned its constant disk accessing and page file swapping means it'll kill the drive in no time.

Ok well each to their own I guess, just I don't think XP is suitable for this type of device, they'd probably be better off putting M$ WM6 rather than XP on it.

[Anonymous Coward]

Windows XP?

I thought that was going to be discontinued in a few months? What will they do then?

[carl]

@ Windows of 4gig nay-sayers

I've had an eee for 3 months now that I use on a daily basis althoug it's not my main laptop (4gig with an 8 gig SDHC card & 2 gig RAM). I have turned off the page file and setup a ramdrive, pointed my browser caches to it and all runs perfectly. I cut down my XP build to remove the crap I didn't need and have XP and Office 2007 installed in 1.5gig. That has left plenty of room for any other apps and my data is stored on the 8 Gig SDHC card.

Before I installed the cut down version of XP I still managed an install with Office that came in at 2.5gig.

At the end of the day, you pay your money and you choose your OS based upon what you require.

It works for me.

[Charles Burrows]

I'll have an Eee please Bob

When I went in, PC World only had the 2Gb memory versions, not the 4Gb.

[Anonymous Coward]

@ Windows of 4gig nay-sayers

I've had one since release (only complaint is that its on its third keyboard, though they are only a tenner and quick to replace). I think running with Xandros on the 4Gb is the way to go for most users, the bundled interface 'feels' like a PDA or phone, is simple and probably not what most people would expect from a linux desktop - in a good way I mean.

Despite this, I currently have XP Home + Star Office etc running OK (with compressed 4Gb drive) and SD card for storage. Windows drivers are all bundled on DVD including a nice util to provide 800x600 virtual screen - its simple to install and works well for everyday apps, internet etc.

Problem with XP Home is you can't adjust or remove the pagefile.sys unless you add physical RAM - and in any case since Windows <=XP can't run without virtual memory even if you think you've switched it off by ditching pagefile you'll find a new 20-40mb paging file is created automatically in system32 however much physical RAM you have.