South Africa gets low cost Via powered desktop
By Jonathan Schlaffer
Via has gotten into the habit of producing slow low power use processors for use in low end and/or power efficient computers that are basic enough for browsing the web and running office suites. Enter the Mecer Education desktop destined for South Africa.
Everyone seems to be making an education PC these days be it the OLPC (one laptop per child) or Intel’s Classmate PC. Mecer has joined the party with its Education Desktop, though; the name could be catchier.
The Education Desktop is designed for well, education so no fragging your friends at a LAN party. It is powered by a Via 1.5GHz C-7D processor and has support for up to 2GB of DDRII memory. In addition it has a SATA or IDE hard drive, an optical drive and audio jacks. Its power supply is only 180W but that should be sufficient for its configuration.
A keyboard and optical mouse are included. More specific information about pricing or configurations was unavailable.
Mercer says either Windows Vista Premium or a distribution of Linux can be installed on this computer. The way this computer is configured, it doesn’t have a prayer of being able to run Vista Premium, Basic, maybe. Linux is more the style for a computer with a low amount of memory and a slow yet power efficient processor.
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Stumble It!

July 9th, 2007
Just like China, Africa doesn’t need fancy computers – just ones that will get the job done. All that fancy pants stuff is sold to naive Americans.