HP Bundles AMD-Linux For Presario At Desi Price

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Kolkata: : Welcome to New Year’s Diwali sale — Hewlett-Packard is slashing the price of its Compaq Presario home PC using a combination of AMD processors and Linux operating system (OS), thus also striking another blow at the dominance of Wintel in the Indian market.

For PC users, the savings are huge: a branded MNC PC for Rs 30,990, against the current Presario price of Rs 39,990 based on Wintel or Microsoft’s Windows OS and Intel chip.

For the Presario, which has a very high brand recall because of its sleek design and unique black and silver colours as against the usual white PCs, it will be the lowest price in its history. In fact, it will be the lowest price ever for a branded PC offered by a multinational.

The carbon black/ silver Presario will have AMD Athlon XP 1800+ 1.5 GHz processor with Red Hat Linux OS. The same Presario with Intel’s P4 1.6 Ghz chip and Windows XP home comes with a price tag of around Rs 40,000.

The AMD-Linux Presario will have a 40gb HDD, 128 DDR SDRAM with 48X CD-ROM drive, 56 Kbps data/fax modem and integrated 10/100 network interface card.

HP India’s country manager for consumer desktops PV Viswanath said the new range offers MNC quality and aftersales service at an assembled price.

“This is an interesting and aggressive price for the home as well as the small office and home office consumers. Except Windows XP, we are providing everything which will serve the computing needs of the home customers,” he said.

By pricing the Presario at around Rs 30,000, HP has taken on local assemblers in their home turf: the small office, home office segment.

But assemblers feel there is no danger. For them, a similar AMD-Linux combination will cost around 15 per cent less than the latest Presario offering. With this comes the question of customisation. Conscious desktop customers wants to have a customised PC rather a box with fixed specs, assemblers feel.

As one assembler pointed out, Linux is still not a self-installed OS, nor does it allow for many gaming or graphics applications — both problems for the home segment.

“There are issues with the AMD-Linux combination... First, for the home segment, the problem is that Linux is still not a self-installed OS,” said S Gopinath, vice-president of RDG Systems & Software Pvt Ltd.