Laptop Hunting in Taiwan

It's the end of high school...the end of living at home...and the end of having that nice desktop computer.

So it's just natural that I go shopping for a laptop over the summer, and where else but in Taiwan where most of the heralded computer manufactures are based in? It is true most of their stuff is now Made in China, but that's fine with me (but I can't speak for the rest of the general population).




Good thing the government isn't trying to fight back anymore...





And being the tech savvy guy that I am........I wanted a laptop that is future proof (and also gaming capable - what else will I do in college?) So I did some searching...and viola! I find this Asus beauty.


Intel Core 2 Processor, 250 GB of hard drive space (do I hear illegal downloads?), 3 gigs of memory, and of course an awesome video card: a Nvidia 9500M GS (nothing against ATI).

All for a bargain price.

So I happily went with my dad to Taiwan's biggest computer shopping center (and probably in Asia - they don't call it Computex Taipei for nothing) with the intention of finding this fine piece of engineering. I was all hyped up on window shopping, bargaining, testing, having my dad pay for everything, getting free stuff, and leaving there satisfied.

It hit me all the harder when they didn't have it. I was utterly baffled. It wasn't that they didn't have the "Asus" laptops (they had plenty of overpriced models), but the same model name and look had completely different specifications than those in America. Instead of a Geforce 9 card, most of the laptops in Taiwan (Acer, HP, BenQ to name a few) carried the two year old Geforce 8 cards. It seems that the Taiwanese manufacturers make the "dumb" builds of their laptops here, ship the better laptops overseas to America, and leave aging old gen hardware to rust in their home country.

Is it just me, or is that weird?

After a horrendous subway ride home, I realized it wasn't all that bad - I have Newegg in the good ol' USA to back me up. Them and the sales tax, recycling tax, service charge, shipping costs...and possibly even a tariff for not buying a Dell.

I hope they throw in some extra bubble wrap.