Anyone own or have experience with HP TouchSmart PC's? I've read mixed reviews... but haven't had the chance to actually "test drive" one.

Pros & Cons? Thanks...

Wow... nobody?

Never heard of them, but HP hardware, which used to be the marvel of the engineering world, is generally crap these days.

I have an HP engineering calculator that I bought new in 1987, and it is still running like new ON THE ORIGINAL BATTERY.

I hate what happened to that company. When I was an engineer, just about all the test equipment was HP, scopes, meters, etc.

Now they're known for being a crappy PC clone maker that used to make cool calculators.

I worked in a lab that used to repair high end HP gear like gas chromatographs.

Gold plated circuit boards, military grade construction, design for repairability, exhaustive service manuals - now THAT was some gear!

I've heard complaints from some dealers about the screens braking easely and Many faulty screens

What are you looking to do with it? Be a home machine or a music machine?

Graphic design and some music apps I guess.

I have no experience with the "Touch Smart" PCs, however:
HP makes two different major lines of PCs, one for home users, one for business use. The home series includes many of the Compaq models and all the Pavillion models, including the Touch Screen models. The home series (like Dell and others) is built to an extremely tight price point (read this as lots of price competition, especially on the lower end models - meaning that components are sourced with price as a high weighting factor.)

The HP Business line of PCs is geherally built better, since many businesses get past the "cheapest up front" and move on to the "cheapest in the long run" philosophy. My company owns about 20 computers, all the desktops, workstations, and servers are HP, the notebooks are a mix of Compaq and Lenovo (IBM ThinkPad). I don't sell computers, but earn billable hours helping my clients purchase what will best meet their needs, and I do send a lot of them to www.hp.com for their purchases.

In general, the only clients that I would specifically recommend any Touch Screen computer to are those who need to run custom applications designed to work with Touch Screens (like restaurants) where a limited number of inputs are chosen, the keyboard is not used (or used very little), and the touch screen's additional cost is needed for egronomic factors (dentist office, etc.) I do use one Touch Screen device, the BlackBerry Storm 2 - perfect for the application of carrying it everywhere - reduces the number of places where dirt and grime can get into the machine.

Summary: If you buy at the higher end, I can recommend HP without hesitation. I bought a group of the high-end PC workstations, they have been very reliable - NO failures except a couple of hard drives and one power supply that developed a noisy fan (still worked, but noisy) in a 7 year period.

+1 on that. I still have my HP-15C calculator from 1982 on the original battery. My mother still has an HP-35, one of the original ones (1973?) bought at an employee discount price with the help of a friend at HP (we lived in Palo Alto). I learned RPN on that machine and still prefer it to algebraic.