On Monday 26 February 2007 20:46, Kai Ponte wrote:
On Monday 26 February 2007 05:32:39 pm Tony Alfrey wrote:
Kai Ponte wrote:
It would cost me a hundred bucks less for the Vista box. I don't think Dell has quite got this worked out yet.
I seem to recall there being some argument for this a while back. The pre-loaded machines actually cost the clone manufacturers less, simply because all the drivers are pre-loaded on some sort of image, whereas they need to spend more labor hours on these machines.
I don't understand. Why is there any software labor on a box with no installed operating system?
There is no, but hardware for windows is often cheaper as it is using main CPU to run driver instead of built in one. Example is winmodem. It has only signal processor, no CPU.
The articles I had read - which all delt with why Linux doesn't come pre-installed on mass-market systems - had to do with certifying all hardware works when there is no OS loaded.
Now, when I used to mass-market white-box systems in the '90s, I pretty much just ran a DOS-based test floppy on all systems to make sure they worked. I used to burn in all systems for at least 24 hours.
I don't know if PC makers still do this.
No. It is cheaper to replace failed system, as nowadays not many will fail. Apropos cloning, it doesn't matter what is on hard disk when you clone image to disk. You connect it to cloner and after few minutes drive is ready to go. It has more to do with preparation of images for particular hardware, but if they want then distributions will gladly run that job for them. All distro needs is hardware to configure original hard disk for imaging. -- Regards, Rajko. http://en.opensuse.org/Portal -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse+help@opensuse.org