Meet Huang Jing

Huang Jing is a young Chinese lady who bought an ASUS V6800 laptop back in February, 2006. Right from the start, it kept crashing so she sent it back to ASUS several times for repairs. During the last repair job, ASUS reportedly replaced the processor but it overheated and caused the laptop to keep crashing. In the end, it was discovered that the replacement CPU was an Intel engineering sample.

Huang then threatened to go public with her discovery and sue ASUS unless she was paid a princely sum of 5 million US dollars. Apparently, the Americans not only introduced McDonalds and Starbucks to China, but also the art of litigation. Unfortunately, ASUS had Huang and her lawyer, Zhou Chengyu, arrested for extortion.

Later, they were acquitted due to "insufficient evidence", and on October 27, 2008, Huang sued ASUS for "defamation, selling defective products, and false accusation". It was not known if the original processor was also an engineering sample.

Huang has a website (www.asus315.com) that tells of her experience. It is mostly in Chinese but there is an English page where she (or her team) claimed that Intel not only knew about the misuse of engineering samples by their partners, but also helped or allowed them to do so when the supply of genuine processors was insufficient to meet the demand.

In fact, she reminded us of the Intel processor scandal that happened in November 2005, when a Chinese manufacturer was caught selling large quantities of fake Intel Pentium 4 processors that were actually relabelled Intel Celeron processors. To be fair to Intel, they have never been found guilty of colluding with their misbehaving partners.

So, Do You Really Know What's In Your PC?

It may be easy to scoff at all these reports as hearsay and unsubstantiated rumours, but do you truly know what's really in your PC? Unless you are a PC hardware enthusiast who is as comfortable swapping expansion cards and processors as you are breathing air, then it is very likely you have no idea if the processor in your PC is even an Intel processor, much less a genuine one.

Whether Huang's accusations ring true or not, we should really do a little homework on what's really inside our computers. After all, we paid for it with hard-earned money. It really matters if we end up with a genuine processor, or an engineering sample. Engineering samples are not hand-picked cherries as many would like to think. Rather, most are damaged or abused parts that will never meet qualification tests.

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