I normally don't shop at Walmart, I think they are the spawn of the devil. Having said that, for people that really need to have the mobility of a laptop, but either can't afford, or can't bring themselves to spend the going rate on a latop, they have a really low price point on their entry level laptops. A fully functioning laptop, granted the specs aren't all that, is available for $498, without Windows though. That, my friends, is what I call inexpensive.

Back to the whole specs thing though. The processor is a VIA C3 1 ghz part. For those of you that aren't the hardware freaks that I am, the VIA chips are actually Cyrix chips rebadged after VIA bought Cyrix. The performance of said chip is roughly that of a Celeron2 600mhz part, unless you plan on doing any gaming. The chip has no real FPU (floating point unit) to speak of. Coupling that with the onboard video which is most likely VIA's own S3 graphics technology and surely using shared memory, you will be lucky to play an older game like Quake3 at anything higher than 800x600.

Also, the machine comes with only 128 megs of RAM, so I hope you are using Remote Desktop to do your coding, I don't want to be you if you are opening VS.NET 2003 on *that*, especially after taking into consideration at least 16 megs of that is going to the shared memory registers, might want to splurge and get another stick of RAM...

The thing I finding interesting in a humorous sort of way is even after the whole 'agreement' (read:we pay you $20 million and you do what we asked) between Microsoft and Lindows to not call itself Lindows anymore, and the change to the Linspire branding, the Walmart site still lists the OS on the machine as “Lindows/Linspire”. So not only is Lindows display, which shouldn't be, it is also displayed first, before the current legal name. I guess Michael Robertson feels it is time for his next installment from billg...