Did they send that to you for the $149 price of the VL-100? It seems to be a substantial upgrade over the specs of the VL-100. I looked up the motherboard and the CPU is upgradeable to a Core 2 Duo. That's good--you don't want to be locked into trailing edge technology.
They did send this system as I described it for the $149.00 price (and yes that did seem to be a substantial upgrade). To be honest, I really wasn't concerned about being locked into old technology. I justed wanted something inexpensive with Linux (preferably VL) onboard that would meet my daughters basic computing needs which are relatively simple. She will be able to upload/download music, ringtones, photo's, research and complete school projects, watch music videos and web based telivision shows. It will be relevant to her as is for several years and I doubt that she will be the least bit concerned with state of the art technology. The computer will probably wear out from consistent use before it has a chance to become sadly irrelevant.
It reminds me of a Packard Bell computer my wife bought me several years ago. It had a Cyrix MII 266MHz processor, 40MB RAM, a 4.3 Gig Seagate hard drive, a win modem and an el cheapo windows sound card on a daughter board. It came with Windows 98 First Edition. She later added a scanner and an external cdrw. I had not discovered linux yet and had been actively using a Commodore 128 computer with external hard drive and a 2MB expansion cartridge. The other box was a 486 loaded with DOS and Win 3.1 (which I accessed per application from a DOS menu since I was a dos user). I had no 32 bit windows experience at that time. I was using a local internet service with my Commodore. It had long ago converted to a forunner of the modern ISP but still had a menu system on an apache server that allowed me to surf the net with Lynx. I did research and wrote papers for college courses I had picked up in the evenings. So at that time my Commodore setup was relevant to me.
There were already Pentium II computers on the store shelves with fantastic cpu speeds of 300 to 450 MHz. Even so I was able to write essays, learn linux (I installed red hat 5.2 on that box from command line), scan, edit and organize photo's, documents (OCR apps), surf the web, use email and chat applications, build web sites and indulge myself in writing stories. Clearly it was well behind the state of the art when it was purchased and utilized the cheapest parts possible. It had extremely limited upgrade possiblities. Yet I was able to be productive with that computer until the day it died 5 years later (from constant use and abuse). I even installed zip slack and my first copy of VL on that box. The internet and most operating systems (even VL) outgrew the old Packard Bell but it served me quite well (and gave me the opportunity to learn to dislike windows altogether).
Your daughter proves once again that Linux is easy to use. Enjoy!
I think if provided with a linux box with a functional desktop like KDE then most people will figure it out well enough to use it. My daughter has been exposed to Windows 98 through XP at home and at school yet she did not have the least bit of trouble figuring out VL SOHO.
Oh, by the way I still have a brand new Commodore 64 in the box with rubber bands, twist ties and wrappers in place.
