I ordered my IQ 826 from HP Online on 1/12/09.   It arrived 9 days later with 2 broken parts:  the TV tuner card  and the camera card reader.  It took days to get an HP tech to acknowledge that the TV tuner was defective, rather than the cable company's signal being too week.   I had to borrow an external USB tuner that worked fine to demonstrate that it was the tuner card.    So they sent me a shipping box to return the computer.   But it was the wrong size.  Then they sent me another shipping box--again the wrong size.  So they asked me if I could ship it back in the original carton--fortunately I had not thrown it away, although I had to repair it a bit.  So I returned it, and the FedEx receipt said that the computer was received on 2/17, but today HP notified me that it was received on 2/19 and gave me a return date of 3/2.   When I called the repair people, I was shuffled off to someone in India, who simply read from a script.  I got on line with a tech in the chat line, but she had no power to expedite the repairs or even the shipping.   So with luck, 49 days after I ordered the computer, I MIGHT have a fully working computer, if something else doesn't break. 

I would find it very hard to recommend an HP computer to a friend or family member due to poor quality, poor technical service, and very long repair times.  Fortunately, my 5 year old eMachine still works  (I am using it to type this note), despite being a little slow.   Maybe my next  computer will be another eMachine.