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Rain, More Rain & Some Wind


Typhoon Bilis has finally reached Taiwan, causing a spot of bother on the Eastern side of Taiwan. As for Taipei, all we have seen is a lot of rain and heavy wind. Most of us were hoping for a typhoon day off, but it looks like the government disagress and has formally announced that school children are to attend school and people are required to go to work. Ah well, so much for a long weekend.

I finally have obtained an extension to my alien resident card (ARC) for another three years. Cost me NTD$3000 and a bit of waiting at the police station, but we finally got there in the end. After getting the administrative stuff out of the way, we decided to stop by Nova, another shopping haven for electronics, PCs, gadgets and notebooks near Taipei Main Station. After one year of deliberation, we decided to finally plunge into our pockets and buy a notebook. The one we opted for was an ASUS A8J (A8HT23DD), which contains an Intel Duo chip (all the rage, but no support for 64-bit), 1GB of RAM, 80GB hard disk drive, DVD super multi-burner, nVidia GeForce Go T2300 256MB graphics card, a 0.35 million pixel built-in webcam and host of freebies, like a wireless mouse, a heat dissapater and a BMW F1 holdall. All for NTD$36900 (cash).



But guess what, I think something is dodgy. When the sales person opened it up to add another stick of 512MB RAM, we noticed that were some dust and some figure marks on the board. Hmmm...strange we thought. After a quick demo and all that, it seemed OK, so we took the thing home. The notebook is meant to have wireless connectivity built-in, so I tried to get it connected to my wireless LAN at home. I spent 5 hours trying every configuration I know to get it talking to my 3Com wireless router, but with no joy. I thought it was the security, but I turned that off on my router and tried to connect my new notebook to an unsecured wireless LAN, but it was still not having any of it. What a nightmare and disappointment. We finally decided that it must be the hardware or something, we we have decided to take it back tomorrow. Great isn't it? Somehow, we feel that something is not quite right. Within two days, I'm having to travel to Nova again in the typhoon rain to get the guy sort it out. Let's just hope it would be straight forward!

Keep you guys updated on the notebook situation. Wish me luck, I think I'm going to need it.

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