Laptops have become the tool du jour in education. I see college kids working on wireless machines all over campus and high-schoolers using them at home. But juiced up with unnecessary hardware and weighed down by the cost of proprietary software, laptops are way too expensive. Ask any parent who's replaced a stolen machine.

Computing needs to be cheaper. So cheap, in fact, that replacing a student's laptop has about the same significance as buying a new copy of a lost textbook.

Given the cost of today's textbooks, I'll take a $100 laptop as a reasonable goal. The payoff would be huge; cheap laptops could put digital tools into the hands of students throughout the globe, and the plan to make and distribute them is no pipe dream.

A nonprofit outfit called One Laptop Per Child has plans to have 15 million such machines in production by the end of next year, and to ship over 100 million a year starting in 2007. Six governments have expressed a strong interest, among them China, Brazil, Thailand and Egypt. The plan is for ministries of education in these countries to distribute the laptops like textbooks to all students.

And no, this isn't the latest Dell or Apple machine, laden with DVD players and Dolby sound. But the machine that Nicholas Negroponte, chairman of MIT Media Lab, described at a recent U.N. technology conference in Tunisia has a lot to recommend it. Designed to take a beating, it's encased in hard rubber and made to order for schools in the world's poorest countries, where digital resources are rare.

Third-world countries have chronic power problems, so the laptop, which will come with an AC adapter that doubles as a strap for carrying the unit, will also ship with a crank. If the power fails, the user can crank the machine back into life, with a minute's worth of cranking producing 40 minutes of work time on the unit's low power display.

The machines will work off a 500-MHz processor built by AMD, using flash memory instead of a hard drive. That's a choice based not only on cost but also on fragility, since Negroponte's group (laptop.media.mit.edu) wants to make machines that are as usable as pencils for younger students. No massive data storage options here, but the PCs will have four USB ports for connectivity and they'll come with out-of-the-box wireless networking, linking the laptops to each other and giving them Internet capabilities.

That last point is worth dwelling on, given the cost of Internet service in developing countries. In Kenya, for example, local telephone charges added to monthly dial-up fees make the Internet a luxury many cannot afford, and broadband, where it is available, is over $100 a month. So getting Kenyan students on the Internet through these new laptops will have to await political changes that may eventually surface through competition and deregulation.

Until then, though, being able to set up peer-to-peer networks to allow students and teachers to exchange information locally is a powerful capability. The machines will also include basic software on the open-source model, using a Linux-based operating system provided by Raleigh-based Red Hat. That eliminates costly licensing fees for commercial software and also frees up the system for innovation.

Steve Jobs, in fact, offered free copies of Apple's OS X operating system for the machine, but Negroponte's group turned down the offer because OS X, like Windows, is not open source.

Part of the learning experience is working with an operating system that can be modified and enhanced by the user.

Let's hope the new laptops spur a wave of creativity keyed on that open-source model, spreading the benefits of PCs to children across the economic spectrum.

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