Windows XP to be on low-cost Eee PC by end of 2007

According to IT World via a IDG News Service 10/16/07 report, Windows XP will be on a version of the Asus Eee PC by the end of this year.

The Asus Eee PC was officially launched Tuesday, going on sale at 5 pm in the Neihu District's 3C store. The first available model cost NT$11,100 ($340). Other models will be released by the end of November, with all versions of the Eee PC running Xandros. The cheapest Eee PC, the 2G Surf will retail for NT$7,999 (US$245) when it comes out around the end of November.

While Microsoft is now pushing Vista instead of XP, it has agreed to extend sales of XP through June 2008. Beyond that, the future is unclear for the OS. But low-cost notebooks like the Asus Eee PC will not take well to using Vista since they have minimal RAM and very minimal hard disk space, which are two Vista requirement.s

Asus did demo an Eee PC running Windows XP Pro 2002 SP2, including Office 2003 versions of Excel, PowerPoint and Word. The model used was the same as the NT$11,100 Linux-based Eee PCs on display, a 900MHz Intel Celeron M processor, 512M-bytes of DDR2 DRAM and 4G byte flash drives.

The two lower-cost Eee PCs are both named Surf. The NT$7,999 version has 256MB DDR2 DRAM. The more expensive Surf has a 4G byte flash drive, 512MB DDR2 DRAM and will cost NT$9,999 when it comes out in mid-November.

It is unclear what microprocessors the two Surfs use as Asus did not supply spec sheets and the laptops' system information only said that they were Intel processors.

The more expensive Eee PCs were not given nicknames. The NT$11,100 version includes a webcam and speakers, and could carry out simple voice commands such as "computer, access the Internet," or "computer, make a phone call." The more expensive version, NT$13,888 and due out at the end of November, has an 8GB flash drive and 1GB DDR2 DRAM,

The Eee PCs ship with support for two languages, Chinese and English.