We’ve known for a while that Microsoft was going to be showing up on OLPC’s XO. Starting in September the little laptop meant to inspire children in developing countries will ship with two operating systems, a bare bones Windows XP and Linux Sugar. Hardware configurations remain the same (256 MB of RAM and 1GB SSD), so the SD card slot accommodates Windows XP. Which means by unplugging the SD card it restarts into Sugar – who knew uninstalling Microsoft products could be so easy?
Laptop Magazine took the laptop to test, with a hands on look at it running XP. They found a slow boot time with a long application load time. Streaming media had its share of hiccups, and multi-tasking could only go so far. That is not to say all was bad, after several hours with the XO, they concluded that it was running “pretty well”.
Ultimately, they see having Sugar and XP both available as options as being a good thing, and remain hopeful that OLPC will fine tune XP performance. Check out there rundown, complete with videos, here.