Asus: Windows XP-Based Eee PCs to Outsell Linux

Asus formally launched the Eee PC with XP on board at the Cebit trade show earlier this month, in Germany. As these start to reach users, Asus has released some estimates sure to disappoint Linux fans.

The Eee PC has been hot, selling 300,000 units last year with Asus estimating sales of 5 million units this year. But the majority of those, approximately 60%, will be Windows-based, according to Asus. And that's even with the "head start" Linux has been given with Windows-pre-installed Eee PCs launching only recently.

At a news conference in Taipei on Thursday, Jonney Shih, chairman of Asus said, ""About 60 percent of them (Eee PCs) will have Windows XP operating system. A lot of people have been waiting for the Windows version."

Well, yeah. Including me, but mostly for my wife, who wants one but has some programs she's using for her dissertation that only run on Windows.

But besides that, most people are used to Windows. She'd rather not learn something new, whether it's Linux or MacOS. And that's the ticket for a lot of people, right? Which is where these predictions come from.

Until the Asus Eee PC 900 arrives, Asus will be selling two different versions of the Windows Eee PC laptop. The Eee PC Surf XP will cost approximately $400 with a 7" LCD screen, 4GB of NAND flash memory for storage, and 512M-bytes of DDR2 RAM. The Eee PC 4G XP will cost approximately $473 with the same specs and an additional 4GB SD card as well as a larger capacity battery and a built-in 3-megapixel webcam. Similar Linux versions are $349 and $399 respectively, so the price differential isn't that large.

So yes, I'd buy the XP version over the Linux version, if only for the convenience of being able to use the same programs I already do. The price difference isn't daunting enough to dissuade me.