They will be available with an 8GB micorSD card and at this point you may have to think twice whether you can live without having one of them for your Linux or Windows XP model.

So, you have your chance to pullthe trigger before Monday, as there is a weekend ahead that may be full of remorse. What have you decided to make the most of it?

Source: engadget

Merrill Lynch predicted that “2007 would be the year that notebooks overtook desktops”. For some companies, like ‘Hewlett-Packard’, laptops have become the single most important revenue source.

There are two reasons associated closely with each other. Firstly, a PC vendor can make more profit on an under-$1,000 laptop than it would on a PC at the same cost. Secondly, with the availability of Wi-Fi almost everywhere and laptop prices falling below the magic $1,000 mark, more and more customers and businesses are shifting to laptops.

But the problem starts with Microsoft. The under-$1,000 laptops can’t run ‘Vista’ efficiently. In addition, ‘Vista’ in fact constitutes a large portion of a laptop’s cost.

Upgrading the hardware again loads cost. ‘Vista Home Basic’ is actually no better than a trash.

Users at large do not upgrade their basic laptops. Computer cost margins are razor-thin. If people want top-of-the-line laptop, vendors are happy to provide them at an appropriate price. But companies like ‘Dell’, ‘HP’, and ‘Acer’ know it very well and now they sell more of their cheaper systems than premium ones.

A cheap laptop normally has a gigabyte or less RAM and some kind of embedded graphics chip like an Intel Graphics Media Accelerator 950 with 8MB to 64MB dynamically allocated shared graphics memory. ‘Vista’ on the other hand requires 2GB before it becomes usable, and there’s no point in even trying to run ‘Vista’s Aero interface’ with that low level of graphical horsepower.

Steven J. Vaughan says, “It doesn’t come to any surprise to me that Acer and Dell would both rather have you buy XP than Vista. Oh, I know, you’ll find those ‘Acer recommends Windows Vista Business for Business Computing’ labels and the like on their Web pages. But talk to the salespeople. You’ll find it fascinating how happy they are to direct you to XP”.

In reality, XP is more stable and works with more software and equipment than ‘Vista’ does. It costs the companies less in technical support.

Dell and few other small companies, like Asus with its tiny Eee PC 4G UMPC are also selling Linux-powered laptops. Vendors make even more upfront profit per unit for these sales.

Steven J. Vaughan makes further analysis and say,” that under-$500 Toshiba laptop with Home Basic? With 512MB of RAM and embedded Intel graphics, even the already mediocre Home Basic is still going to suck dead snakes through rusty tailpipes. Stick any Linux distribution on it; say ‘Fedora 8, gOS 1.02 or OpenSUSE 10.3’, and you’ve got a really useful laptop”.

Steven J.Vaughan says, “Do the math. Vista doesn’t work for today’s laptop market. XP and Linux do. It’s really that simple”.