The Electronics Corporation of Tamil Nadu has started this year’s sale of inexpensive laptops with preloaded Linux (SUSE Linux Enterprise) for students studying in Tamil Nadu. There have been many press releases, for example, see this one. The laptop is said to be procured from Dell or Acer.
The high capacity version of the ELCOT laptop is priced at Rs. 31,717 and is really cheap! To be really convinced of this, I checked out the Dell site for their price on an equivalent configuration. This is really easy, because they have a nice customise feature on their site. So I went here and chose options to make the configuration equivalent to ELCOT’s config here. The results are astounding! The Dell price turns out to be Rs. 55317! The big price addons were 7000 rupees for the 320 GB upgrade, from 160 GB and the 3 years international support which added another (approx.) 8000 rupees. Of course, since Dell has not rolled out its preloaded Linux version in India (Dell sells with Ubuntu preloaded, in the US), the price above includes the price of Microsoft’s operating system.
Students are going to make a killing in this sale! Hurry! Last date for registrations in this first phase is July 15.
Edit: Elcot has extended the last date, as expected. The new last date is 31 July.
Edit 2: Elcot has further extended the last date! The new last date is 15 August.
Edit 3: Elcot has further extended the last date! The new last date is 31 August. And, I’m bored of updating this.
Edit 4: Elcot has finally closed the student laptop scheme 2008.
Filed under: Linux, Product | Tagged: Acer, Dell, ELCOT, laptop, Linux, Students, SUSE, ubuntu | 31 Comments »
