Microsoft is feverishly hammering away at Windows XP, in order to get it to fit XO. In this context, the Redmond company has managed to reinstate its support for low cost flash based computing devices, namely the machine under the One Laptop per Child umbrella. Come mid 2008, Microsoft plans to have a production quality release of Windows XP, designed to seamlessly integrate with the OLPC XO computer, in addition to Intel's Classmate PC and ASUS' Eee PC. The initiative is an integer aspect of the efforts to reach the next five billion people via the Microsoft Unlimited Potential Group.

"We are hard at work on the project here, and we are using an approach that is a little unusual for Microsoft in that we are managing the entire process of adapting and testing an existing version of Windows for a new PC. Usually the hardware vendor does this. And the Windows port to the XO is by no means done. Between Microsoft employees and third party contractors that we have brought into the effort, we have over 40 engineers working full-time on the port. We started the project around the beginning of the year and think it will be mid-2008 at the earliest before we could have a production-quality release," revealed James Utzschneider, general manager, Product Marketing, Microsoft Business Solutions Group.

As early as January 2008, the Redmond company will make available formal design guidelines aimed at hardware developers with the purpose of enabling a smooth integration of Windows XP on flash-based computers. In fact, the way in which XO uses the flash memory, instead of a traditional hard disk, is the main reason why Microsoft's Windows XP has a hard time running on it by default. The Redmond company has even convinced OLPC to add a supplemental slot for an internal SD card that will take the laptop's storage capacity all the way to 2 GB, barely sufficient in order to run Windows XP and the Office Suite.

"The XO computer uses flash memory instead of a hard disk drive for storage. This is one of the reasons OLPC can get the production cost of the computer down to $188. This is a relatively new class of machine, and we have to do design work to get Windows and Office to work reliably and with good performance using only 2 GB of storage. The XO actually only comes with 1GB of flash, and we asked the OLPC to add a slot for an internal SD card that will provide the 2 GB of extra memory needed to run our software," Utzschneider added.