Posted: Submitted by wtanaka (648) on Wed, 2005-12-14 10:02. | Subject: What are internet cafes in China like?

Some questions I encountered about Internet Cafes in China

Are all of them running Microsoft?

The Internet Cafes that I've seen in China come in two flavors.  There's the massive acre-sized professionally set up ones where you get a card which you insert into the computer to unlock it, or with a password written on it that they use to track your usage time.  These places will have more than a hundred computers -- sometimes hundreds, and run 24 hours a day.  Then there's the smaller "family owned" kind which are more common on the South East Asia tourist circuit, where there might be between 10 and 50 computers, and they keep track of you based on which computer you were sitting at.

Keep in mind that both flavors are: 

1. Probably one of the cheapest forms of entertainment per-hour that you can find.  Many places cost 3-4 yuan per hour ($0.37-$0.50 USD).  If you consider the people making money playing games, it can even be a money-making venture to live in an internet cafe.
2. ...therefore full of kids and young people smoking, chatting online, watching movies (which I think are stored across the different computers, or maybe on some file server) and playing games.

Because of their clientele, they must run windows (98, 2000, and XP are all seen) so that the computers run the popular games and the QQ chat software.

Are most of them legal or pirated?

I'd bet more than 99% of them are pirated.  I think Microsoft is working on cheaper versions of Windows for poor countries like China, but I don't think that's happened yet.  A copy of Windows is prohibitively expensive here.

What have other people's experiences with internet cafes been?