Wal-Mart to sell sub-$300, bloatware-free PC

Looks like the folks at Wal-Mart have found a hot new market to tap into and no, I'm not talking about Shrek merchandise. Apparently this "Personal Computer" thing is really starting to take off and the Walton clan wants a piece of the action. As you'll recall, the big box retailer started selling Dell desktops and laptops back in May, marking the Texas OEM's first steps into retail in the physical realm (or "meatspace" as some folks like to call it). A few short months later, Wal-Mart is back at it again with the Everex IMPACT GC3502--a budget box with the back to school crowd in mind. For just south of $300 you get a 1.5Ghz VIA CPU, 1GB of RAM, 80GB of HDD, a DVD burner, a keyboard, a mouse and a set of speakers. To top it off, the machine comes pre-installed with Vista home and OpenOffice 2.2 ... and that's it. This PC is not only dirt cheap, it's also crapware free, which means computer novices won't have to trouble themselves with trying to remove un-uninstallable AOL software. This is an encouraging trend indeed and at $300 for a just-add-monitor PC, the IMPACT ain't too shabby either.

For more on the budget PC:
- see this Ars Technica article