Magnifico bucko and Dazzer need to calm the hell down. You are making this site look like its only to be used for laowai that have been in Kunming for a long time - very cliquish. New people that come here want to know stuff too, if you don't like all the posts crazy.laowai has you don't have to read them or put inane and insulting comments on them. It makes newbies and even regular posters scared to post anything that might seem common knowledge to a seasoned Kunming laowai.

I guess the question is: Do you want this to be a helpful community or a cliquish gang where you can rant at peoples ignorance or misunderstandings? You seem to be wanting the latter when we should really be aiming for the former.

I get about 3 spam messages (usually BUY THIS HOUSE!) a day which is annoying as hell, I understand your pain!

The 58 website often puts phone numbers into a picture file so they aren't picked up easily by bots. As such your number was most likely a person reading your add and spamming you. I guess here people get so many spam messages themselves they think its OK to spam others. The spam culture here seems to be prevalent, I guess its just another thing we have to live with in order to stay in this wonderful, enlightened, beautiful utopia *cough* *cough*... :-)

Making a laptop is usually a bit trickier, but not impossible. The problem is that they are more often than not custom designed to fit parts exactly e.g. the case has been designed to fit a specific mobo perfectly (so no consideration for others, which may or may not fit). Where desktops have the ATX standard for fitting mobo's, laptops sometimes use the mATX standard, but this is applied willy nilly at the descretion of the makers (you can imagine a marketing person in the company saying "But I want this edge to be rounded!", which means the engineer has to work on fitting the mobo into a smaller space and hence modifying the mobo!)

I know it is possible to get bare bones laptop cases in the west that usually come with a mobo at least and usually HD as well. But not sure about their availability here. Often when you go down this path with a laptop though you will pay more than buying a new laptop with the same components and it can be a lot more hassle than with a desktop. Though not impossible, I wouldn't do it myself for these reasons.

My advice would be to get a generic branded laptop with a good video card. The games you want to play aren't that taxing and some new laptops come with half decent nvidia mobile graphics cards. I have one in my laptop and can play GTA4 on high settings pretty well - it just causes quite a lot of heat build up - so I would buy a cooler pad if I was gaming on it a lot. I am sure you could look around for one of the big brand laptops in the shops though and check out the video cards they come with. Something like a Nvidia GeForce GT 630M/550M/555M etc would do the trick easily. Just make sure you can buy an international warranty with it which covers it all over the world and for 3 years (I recommend this to anyone buying a laptop as most of their parts have a planned obsolescence period of about 2 years... the last laptop I bought had EVERY SINGLE piece except the keyboard and case replaced for free between 2 and 3 years under warranty). I usually buy Dells because I can get it online, customise lots of parts and their 3 year intl warranty is excellent. But their site here is crappy and their computers are much more expensive than in the west. Better bet is probably to visit the resellers here. I have seen some decent laptops in shops here with good mobile video cards so they are available at least, just not sure about the price and availability of intl/extended warranty.

Build a desktop yourself I reckon, really it isn't that hard if you do the research and have a tinkering spirit! And I am 99% sure you will be able to pick up the bits from the IT malls on 121 road...

Hardest part is usually deciding the motherboard. Once you have that and a case, all the other bits just slide into it and you are away. Note though that you should probably buy some components from a single shop (maybe mobo, hard drive) so you can get the OEM version of an operating system - usually only sold with HD and/or mobo.

Most expensive bits are the processor, mobo and video card depending on how good it is. If you want real gaming performance get an SSD hard drive (solid state drive), put the OS on the SSD and any game you want to play. But if you want cheap, SSD will be out of your price range. Instead get some fast RAM and a lot of it (8GB recommended for Win7) plus a speedy (7200 RPM) HD and you would be away laughing.

Just remember things like always touching the case before touching any components (frying your RAM or mobo with static electricity is not fun), making sure you have enough fans for your insides, make sure you have enough power (get +30% more than what you need at least) and a good heat sink for your processor. Research and price everything first before you build - if your budget is 800 euro you will be able to build a pretty good box for that here.

If you don't know where to start, find a system that would be good that's about your price range on a western site and check to see if you can buy the components here. An example of the box it sounds like your after is:

www.pp.co.nz/products.php?pp_id=COM00434

This is 680 EUR as a straight conversion and would play the games you specify damn well.

Any updates? June 28th is just over 2 weeks away now... might be flying somewhere soon after...

This site: en.kunming.cn/index/content/2012-05/08/content_2943248.htm

says the metro line to downtown will be operational by June 28. Can this be right? Is this even close to correct? If so, that would be sweeeeeet....