The issue I had with them a few years ago -- guess it was almost 5 years ago now -- was that they loaded lots of their own software onto the operating system. It automatically "did you a favor" by watching your every keystroke, and reporting any problems to hp. This slowed down the system tremendously and used up system resources (Win 98 dayd), so people complained they couldn't run many programs on the taskbar.

I bought one anyway, cause I liked the price, and thought it looked really cool, and thought I could clean out the system easily enough. Turned out to be far more of a hassle than I expected. And then a year later it died. Not sure if my cleaning had anything to do with it.

All this was just before HP and Compaq merged. I haven't kept up. Maybe they're all better now.

Rick