OLPC XO

Windows Microsoft officially announced that it was going to port over Windows XP to One Laptop Per Child’s XO laptop in May. Along with the announcement they put up a video of how XP performs on the machine that was originally built to support Sugar, the Linux OS that was designed to promote learning by doing.

Come September, XOs with a dual boot Windows XP and Linux Sugar OS will be shipping to developing countries. LAPTOP Magazine headed up to Cambridge to get an exclusive, and the first unbiased glimpse at the tweaked Windows XP running on the OLPC XO.

Back in May we wondered how the XO with its 256 MB of RAM and 1GB SSD would handle Windows XP. Could the bare bones system run smoothly? Would it support features, like mesh networking, that we found so compelling in the original Sugar OS? Could it really boot in 50 seconds like Bohdan in the Microsoft video promised?

We got the answers to all those questions and also learned that using the XO with Windows XP is a completely different experience than using the original Sugar interface. Sure, that much is obvious, but we are prefacing this mini-review by saying that the following is not a column on which operating system we prefer, it is a look at the performance of XP on the current XO hardware.

Updated Editor’s Note: It has been brought to our attention that the XO we saw yesterday at OLPC’s offices was not the final release of the XP software. In fact, OLPC showed us a prototype XO that should significantly differ from the final release to Microsoft manufacturing (RTM) version.

Michael Gartenberg of Jupiter Research has actually had the RTM version of the XO with XP for a few weeks and is reporting that his experience has NOT been the same as ours. The XO with XP that we saw did not have the correct commercial BIOS slated to ship in Phase-1 devices nor the final 2GB SD card. Gartenberg reports that his system boots in less than a minute. OLPC and Microsoft have told us that application boot time is much quicker.

We are planning to see the final RTM version from Microsoft in the next few weeks. We will then do a second review and update our impressions.

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