'$100 laptop' nonprofit now teamed with Microsoft

Negroponte had other reasons for pursuing a path separate from Windows. For one, Linux is free. That's key when you're trying to make a computer for $100. Plus, Linux was seen as easier to configure for the XOs' specific innovations, such as its ultra-low power consumption.

Negroponte and his crew also talked about how the open nature of Linux better suited the project's vision for "constructivist" learning, with children teaching each other and themselves by tinkering with the computer. Negroponte has said he finds it sad when children learn to use computers mainly as tools for office automation.

"The hundred-dollar laptop is an education project," he often said. "It's not a laptop project."

However, it's enough of a laptop project that Negroponte is eager to speed XO sales and donations beyond their initial deployments, which include Haiti, Afghanistan, Rwanda, Mexico, Peru, Uruguay, Mongolia and Birmingham, Ala.

Negroponte's first big change was to make peace with Intel last year, in hopes of boosting XOs' technical development and blunting competition from Intel's Classmate PCs. But the relationship ended after only a few months.

The Microsoft relationship looks sturdier. Microsoft engineers spent the past year customizing a version of Windows that can run on XOs. Even so, XOs running Windows for now can't use some of the machines' security features and their built-in "mesh" wireless networking.

Negroponte indicated last month that eventually, Windows could be the sole operating system, with Sugar serving as educational software running on top of it. But he said Thursday he does not envision that happening.

Still, a key question will be whether having Windows on the laptops means children make less use of Sugar, one of the project's core innovations. Recently a splinter group formed to keep up development of Sugar, and Negroponte is enduring complaints that education is no longer his top priority.

"OLPC changed its mission outright, and in the most ill-conceived way imaginable," Ivan Krstic, a former security developer for the laptop group, recently wrote in an e-mail.