'$100 Laptop' to Cost $175

The founder of the ambitious ''$100 laptop'' project, which plans to give inexpensive computers to schoolchildren in developing countries, revealed Thursday that the machine now costs $175, and it will be able to run Windows in addition to its homegrown, open-source interface.

Nicholas Negroponte, the former director of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Media Lab who now heads the nonprofit One Laptop Per Child project, updated analysts and journalists on where the effort stands, saying ''we are perhaps at the most critical stage of OLPC's life.''

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