Even if you don't know much, there's always grunt work to be done to get to know a project.

> (Do they ship worse components there?)

There is actually a chance that they might be, considering not all models are available in all regions, thus there are models that are marked for South-East Asia. So as a manufacturer, it's relatively easy for them to be biased.

That said, vendors in South-East Asia have a history of being scammers and taking out original parts and replacing them with cheaper hardware, so that could be a cause too, and HP might be innocent.