The "$100 laptop" now with Windows XP

I wrote a couple of months ago about the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) initiative that was trying to sell a durable laptop computer for no more than $100. The goal of OLPC is to overcome the growing digital divide in the world, where some people – or entire countries - are left behind in the Information Age because they cannot afford access to a computer.

OLPC designed a rugged, easy to use computer called the XO that is aimed at children in the developing world. While governments in a number of nations have bought the computers, OLPC is still lagging behind its goal of producing a $100 computer. OLPC can reach the magic $100 price point only if they can sell the XO in large enough numbers to offset the production costs (often in business the more of a thing you make the cheaper it is to produce each individual one). So far the project has sold 600,000 units at a price tag of $188 each - still cheap, though not as cheap as the project's founder Professor Nicholas Negroponte hoped.

So to meet customer demand, he has made a change to the XO. Initially, to keep costs down, the XO ran a free version of the Linux operating system. Now XO laptops will be available with a version of Windows XP. "Certain countries around the world... have always been very, very insistent that they want Windows as an option," Negroponte told the BBC.

Some critics though say using Windows undermines the OLPC project, saying if children grew up using a computer with a different operating system it would feel natural to them and they would not miss windows since they never would have used it. On a more practical level machines using Windows do not have access to one of the XO's more innovative features - what OLPC calls the "mesh" network, a wireless network that sets up automatically when a group of XO laptops are within range of each other.

Still offering Windows is prompting some additional nations to buy XO laptops, like Egypt, which had held out for the Microsoft OS. Negroponte said he has orders for an additional 400,000 XO laptops, which will bring the total to one million machines sold in the OLPC initiative.