Peru to try out Windows on XO laptops

Microsoft's Lieneke Schol shows off the XO laptop running Windows to Peru's education minister, Jose Antonio Chang Escobedo

(Credit: Microsoft)

Microsoft and the One Laptop Per Child project announced Monday that Peru will be the first country to try out XO laptops running Microsoft Windows as part of a nine-month pilot program.

The companies said they are still trying to determine the size of the trial. Microsoft has been working for some time to port Windows onto the XO devices and the two companies announced in May that OLPC would start selling a Windows-based XO laptop to interested countries.

"We are extremely excited to take part in this historic educational pilot that will benefit school children throughout Peru," Peru's education minister, Jose Antonio Chang Escobedo, said in a statement. "Integrating technology into our school curriculum will help to advance our knowledge economy, improve access to information and will generate opportunities for our students, which, through governmental policies, aims to improve the learning process we are offering our children, as well as closing the digital divide which currently exists between schools in rural and urban areas."

OLPC had initially focused solely on Linux, but began working with Microsoft after a number of countries indicated that they were only interested in the XO if it could run Windows.

"This pilot in Peru represents an important milestone in the evolution of One Laptop per Child," said Charles Kane, president of One Laptop per Child, said in a statement. "It demonstrates our ability to collaborate with Microsoft to provide governments a choice of operating system on the XO laptop."

Microsoft, meanwhile, is working with XO, but has also backed the use of Windows on other education-oriented machines, such as Intel's Classmate PC. (Click here to read about the Bradesco Foundation school in Campinas, Brazil, which is using Windows-based Classmate PCs or here for CNET News' recent Borders of Computing series.)

[Lerianis]

Microsoft should make a special version of Windows Vista that cuts out the power consuming features of it (Aero, etc.) for this project, and THEN use that knowledge in the development of their next OS to make it more 'lean and mean'.
Though... most of the 'bloat' on Windows XP and Vista was from the dang drivers. If Microsoft would LEAVE THOSE ON THE DISC instead of installing it to the hard drive and make them all available for download via the internet when necessary for the devices in question.... most of the 'bloat' of Windows XP and Vista could be avoided with the next version of Windows.

[canberra_photographer]

A version of Vista that cuts out the power consuming features... well that would be Windows NT. The underlying code hasn't changed much since NT 4, they've just painted it up.

[CD_ Rome]

Haven't these people suffered enough?

[Lerianis]

Oh, get off it, CD_ Rome...... Microsoft's OS's are very stable and have been since XP, unless a driver is installed that has a problem with it. That you CANNOT blame on Microsoft, period and done with. The one to blame for that: the people who made the driver in question or the company such as Apple in the iTunes 8 fiasco who included it in their driver package.