Buying a Laptop in Thailand.

There are pros and cons for buying notebook computers in foreign countries. Price and service need to be weighed up in order to arrive at a decision.

I have bought my last three laptops in Thailand even though I live in Australia.

These purchases have been made over a period of six years.

Why buy a laptop overseas?

There are plenty of models to choose from in Australia but manufacturers release different models in Asia compared to the Australian market.
It has always struck me that the Asian models are a better deal than the models I see here locally.
The first laptop I bought was a Fujitso Life Book.

This was an ultra mobile notebook that I liked so much when I played with in one of the shops in Pantip Plaza.
It was one thousand dollars cheaper than the price in Australia.
The reason for that was that ultra portable notebooks have never been a huge seller in Australia because consumers here do not have the problems of space constraints facing our Asian neighbors.

When I bought the second one four years ago it was the only the model that had a 512meg ram memory and an Athlon 2000 processor... It was a Compaq Pressario and it allowed me to play any game that was on the market at that time.
The notebook was not on the market in Australia. For some strange reason all notebook distributors here were selling notebooks with 256 ram memory.

My third notebook purchased in Thailand was an Acer Aspire 5580.which I bought about 15 months ago in Pantip Plaza.
It came with 512 ram but the service department upgraded it with an extra I gig of ram.
The service from IT City was great. They even tested out the latest games on various laptops so I could purchase the best configuration for my purposes.
I have always like gaming and thought it a waste of money to have a separate game console or desktop to handle the power demands of games.
The Aspire came with a Centrino Duo T5500 processor and a NVIDIA GEOFORCE 7300 Graphics card.
At the time of purchase this was a powerful configuration.
I only buy from stores that are part of the VAT refund scheme of Thailand.
I fill out a form get and get a VAT tax refund of 7% at the airport on leaving the country.