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OfficeWorks' cheap laptops

Thumbnail of laptopOfficeWorks are retailing laptops at the moment (1 per customer) for AUD$997.00 apiece. I trooped along today to have a look, booted BeatrIX and it all seemed to work. Dead standard Intel and RealTek chips, AFAICT. Here is a summary, an lspci listing (sent to my camera via USB) and a few photos.

The battery life sucks (2 hours rated), the CPU is reasonable (1.4GHz Celeron), the touchpad is boring and the graphics chipset is unexceptional, but it all seems to work under Linux, and 40GB is twice the hard-disk space I’d expect to see in a bottom-of-the-range item.

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