Laptop scheme a scam? Punjab Chief Minister’s Free Laptop Scheme

As the laptop

distribution continues on various campuses of Lahore, the beneficiaries of this scheme flock the IT markets for laptop related services including operating system changes and software installations. The walls and notice boards in educational campuses are flooded with the advertisements like “Install Windows on your laptop”, “Get MS Office and Windows Media Player”. The laptops are given with Linux-based operating system Ubuntu installed on it. Even the operating systems installed have upgraded versions available easily but the laptops came by default with Ubuntu 10.10 version while currently Ubuntu 12.04 is being used. However unfamiliarity of students with Linux-based OS has created a hoax amongst them and they are shifting to Microsoft Operating Systems Windows 7 or XP. Educational campuses surveys disclose that the rate of Windows installation is varied across institutes and ranges between Rs 150 and Rs 500. Similarly, in IT markets, the price for similar services varies from Rs 200 to Rs 500, while licensed versions of Windows 7 Professional installation costs some Rs 12,000 to Rs 13,000 per laptop. Contrary to these genuine softwares, their pirated versions are easily available on a Rs 50 DVD. Students usually cannot afford that much prices while at the same time they fear the pirated versions may harm their laptops that is why they prefer to get the windows installed from IT experts. A Pakistan Today survey showed mostly people advertising their services use these pirated versions and are earning quite a good bit of money out of it. Yumna Munir, a student of Hailey College of Commerce, said that she had got Windows installed by a person who had placed an ad on her college’s notice board for Rs 500. The advertiser fooled the young lady by claiming that he had installed the genuine Windows 7 on her laptop that she recently got through the Punjab Chief Minister’s Free Laptop Scheme. An advertisement near M.A.O College reads “Get Windows 7 or XP for Rs 500 with full drivers and softwares on Shahbaz Sharif’s Laptops”. The advertisement states the service would be provided at door step. Following the package details, there were written two cell phone numbers to contact for hiring the service. IT gurus point out that the Punjab government smartly tried to comply with the intellectual property rights by offering free laptops with pre-installed Linux-based open source operating system, Ubuntu. But the government should understand that in Pakistan IT growth is based on Microsoft led products, like Windows and Office applications, they maintained. Commenting on the Chief Minister Laptop scheme hardware, IT wizards indicate that though the machine processor is relatively based on new technology, it is slower than the latest iSeries processors. They point out that Dell Inspiron, the laptop given to students, is equipped with Intel Pentium B950 dual-core processor, which is designed for entry-level machines. Though, it is based on Sandy Bridge architecture, but many of the features, like Turbo Boost for the CPU part, Hyper Threading, AES, Virtualization (VT-x and VT-d), Trusted Execution or Intel Quick Sync, are deactivated. A simple web search on Google also presents a similar picture about the laptops. A processor benchmarking website (cpubenchmark.net) reveals that the processor installed in the Dell Inspiron n4050 is the most sluggish processor available in the market. The benchmark chart topper common CPUs indicates that the processor these laptops hhave in them, Intel Pentium B950 2.10GHz, is slower from most common processors, Corei5-2400, Core i7870, AMD Phenom II X6, Corei7-2630QM, Corei7 950, Core i7 960, Core i5-2500K, Core i7-2670!M, Core i7-2600 and Core i7-2600K.