Laptop Buying in California

My laptop fried over the summer, so I had to get a new one. I had an aunt working in an electronics distributor so I managed to get one at a pretty good price (a HP for RM3000)

I'm in California at the moment to recover from jet lag. Another aunt asked me for help to buy a computer. So a good time to do some (belated) cross-continental comparison shopping.

It turns out, that my model costs about $600 (RM1980-ish) over in California! And that wasn't even the cheapest available model. I could have gotten a Dell for $420 (RM1386-ish). So much for our long-cherished assumption that electronics would be cheaper in Malaysia than Silicon Valley.

Oh, but this doesn't include the $40 (RM132-ish) Circuit City charges for "optimization" - i.e. removing all the junk software from Vista (apparently, if we don't do this the computer will be inoperational in a matter of months). Not an issue for me, of course, since I haven't used Windows in 4 years. (Go Ubuntu Linux!) But it shocks me what little regard Microsoft has for their customers' well-being, and how much nonsense those customers are willing to put up with to use Microsoft's wares when superior alternatives are available for free.