I had to give a presentation at a meeting today and didn’t have a laptop with me. The solution: I grabbed a nearby Mac Mini (yes, I left a sticky on the display warning that the machine had been borrowed and would be returned), hooked it up to a projector, and the meeting was saved. But the experience got me thinking: Why aren’t there dozens of cheap, small PCs on the market? And by cheap, I mean about $100. After all, the parts required to produce such a PC are dirt cheap, and Linux is free. But most of the options in this class, like the Zonbu, are at least $200. In fact, in the sub-$100 class, there’s really just one option as far as I know: the decTOP. With a 10GB hard drive, mouse and keyboard included for just $99, this one seems like a steal, despite its underwhelming specs. And you can actually buy four for the price of three, getting the price-per down to $75 (or $87 with shipping). That’s a deal I may not be able to resist. What will I do with four of these puppies? I have no idea. But at least I know the next time I need to do a prezzo and don’t have a laptop handy, I can have one of these ready to roll on a moment’s notice.

I’ve always been at least a little dubious of Nicholas Negroponte’s plan to distribute low-cost laptops to the children of the developing world. I don’t doubt Negroponte’s sincerity; I think he really does believe he’s on a mission to help educate the huddled masses and bridge the global digital divide. However, the idea that technology can educate students in and of itself is a controversial one, and it’s been argued more than once that what these students really need are more teachers, classrooms and books; the basics of education, rather than the trappings of technology. As fellow Engadget alum Cyrus Farivar points out:

Negroponte’s plan to heal the world with laptops is well-meaning but fundamentally flawed. What good is a laptop in the middle of rural Thailand when electricity, much less Internet access, are spotty at best? Rather than getting laptops into the hands of every schoolchild across the world, why not start with an intermediate step? Probably because One Blackboard per Child or One Teacher per Classroom just doesn’t sound as sexy.

Then, of course, there’s the issue of money. It’s a finite resource, and for every $200 spent buying a laptop for a child, that’s $200 that can’t be spent on food, potable water or medicines. While other high-profile projects designed to help the developing world aren’t without their flaws (Bono’s Red, accused of having too-high administrative costs, comes to mind), they at least focus on the basics of food, shelter and health. That said, I’m willing to give Negroponte the benefit of the doubt—and $400 of my money, so I can buy one laptop for the developing world and one for myself. If his project flops, I’ll still have my laptop, which will either end up as a collector’s item or eBay detrius. While I’m at it, though, I’ll go ahead and send Oxfam a few bucks as well. My money’s as finite as anyone’s, but I’m not willing to make this a zero-sum game.

About a year ago, I ripped out the hard drive in a rapidly aging laptop and replaced it with a new one on which I had installed Ubuntu Linux. At the time, I thought I was being rather clever; the machine was crashing constantly under Windows, and I figured that, after 4 years, the ancient HP Omnibook 510 was due for a new hard drive anyhow. Unfortunately, the crashes continued under Ubuntu, to the point where I ended up shoving the laptop into a drawer, convinced that, perhaps, all of the talk about Linux being a more stable OS was just wishful thinking. However, I recently pulled the PC out of the drawer, and decided to try a little experiment. What if, I thought, the problem wasn’t with the original hard drive or new OS? What if it was the hard drive controller? In that case, any hard drive I install will have periodic problems, regardless of the software on it. But if I could boot and operate the PC from an external drive, perhaps it would still work. And that was my project this weekend. Following the excellent instructions on PendriveLinux, I installed Slax on a 512MB thumbdrive. I updated my BIOS to boot from the thumbdrive, and waited. The PC booted, and after a crash-free weekend, I’m guardedly optimistic. The experience hasn’t been flawless; I’ve had to add a shell script to get the PC to recognize my PCMCIA WiFi card and connect to my home network at boot time (and to set the system time via the net, since the internal clock’s battery has long since given up the ghost). And a couple of times, I’ve rebooted without first saving my files back to the thumbdrive. (Slax is designed to run as a Live CD, so it saves all data to RAM; reboot without saving it back to a writeable disk, and it’s all gone.) So far, though, Slax looks like a great option for this old machine. Despite its slow processor (1GHz) and modest RAM (768, some of which is set aside for the Linux kernel and RAM drive), performance is peppy. I wouldn’t use this machine to run GIMP or Doom, but for day-to-day web surfing and modest entertainment (music via a NAS), it’s worth keeping it out of the drawer. And it looks like I’ll be able to use that hard drive as a backup, once I pick up a cheap enclosure.