Mom Reviews the HP Touchsmart IQ770 PC

When I was first contacted about getting a free trial of the HP Touchsmart IQ770 PC, I could hardly believe my luck. They wanted to send me WHAT? For FREE? I of course said yes, but I still wasn’t really sure what I was going to get. When the box came, I couldn’t believe how huge it was-I hadn’t really realized just how big a 19 inch computer screen is!

All I had to do was plug in the power supply and connect it to our home network, and I was all set. The wireless keyboard and mouse took a little getting used to. Because we have a computer stand that I set the PC on, I had to figure out the optimum height at which to hold the keyboard so it would actually work. It took a little maneuvering involving a thick book and a sofa cushion, but it was still very comfortable to use. The wireless mouse was the source of some amusement in my house-I asked my husband to help me figure out why, when I moved the mouse to the left, the cursor moved to the right-I was holding it UPSIDE DOWN. Ha!

The first thing I wanted to do, of course, was see how my blogs looked on the big screen. The PC is designed to also be used as a television, so it has a very sharp resolution and is very bright. I was surprised to find that the color of the header of my blog Table for Five looked completely different than it does on my laptop! Once I was finished playing around, I settled down to really check out the main features of the PC.

It comes loaded with Windows Vista, and the HP SmartCenter. I was not familiar with either of these. The desktop had shortcuts for Internet Explorer (I installed Firefox), eBay, Vonage, and Snapfish, for easy and quick browsing. Now, here’s the really cool part-it’s a touch screen, so all I had to do is tap the icon with my fingertip and boom! I was instantly there. The loading times were blazingly fast. In addition to the desktop, the PC has a button near the bottom right corner that takes you directly to the SmartCenter. Which was hands down, my favorite part. Someone involved in the design of this PC was DEFINITELY a busy Mom!

Is your refrigerator covered with notes reminding you of appointments, the kids’ activities, phone numbers, to-do lists? The HP Touchsmart PC SmartCenter REPLACES ALL OF THOSE! It has VIRTUAL POST-IT NOTES! All you do is tap a note with either your finger or the handy included stylus, and then tap the image of a Sharpie marker. Then start typing, and it “writes” on the sticky note. The font even looks hand-written! You’ll see an example at the end of this post. I let Kaitlyn “draw” me a picture on a sticky note, and she had a blast doing it! It was a good ten minutes distraction for her, which is a LONG time for a toddler!

If you look closely at the photo, you’ll see the image of the marker, the eraser, the ABC that lets you switch to typing, and then an image of a microphone. You click it, and then just talk. The built-in microphone feature records your message, then saves it. You can leave messages for your family in your own voice! We had fun playing with that feature You can also use the SmartCenter to customize your own page of quick links and shortcuts to your favorite applications.

Another great customizable feature is the SmartCalendar. Tapping on a date on the calendar brings it up as a page where you can write in all of your appointments, anything you need to remember to do, and then it’s right there on your own page. No more having to scribble on sticky notes and the backs of envelopes! One thing I should mention-the PC itself moves up and down from the base, so you could put it on your kitchen counter and then move it up to eye-level: think how easy that would make it to have a recipe up on the screen that you could easily see while cooking! Or you could have a Post-It note open to take notes as you get phone calls or make appointments. I’m telling you, this is the best way to organize information I have ever seen!

See that space on the back? When not in use, you can set the keyboard and mouse there, and they are out of the way. VERY cool.

HP Photosmart Touch makes it incredibly easy to manage your digital photos. There is a card reader right on the front of the PC. You can upload, edit, sort and print your photos all with easy touches of the screen. It comes with an integrated printer station with a convenient port in the back, so you can add a compatible HP Photosmart portable printer for on-the-spot photo printing. And the photos look amazing on the big screen! We used the included writeable DVDs to burn slideshows of our photos to watch on our TV.

Oh, the guides! I forgot to mention the guides! Right there in the start menu is a link to guides that walk you through every step of everything you can do with the PC. I used the Getting Started guide to figure out how to burn the DVDs using the LightScribe program. Everything was explained step-by-step, it was so easy.

One thing we did not get a chance to do was try out the Entertainment features. The PC comes with an integrated Personal Video Recorder that lets you play, pause, rewind and record live TV. How cool is that! It also plays the radio and your CDs. I did slip in a DVD to see how well that feature worked-even older DVDs look better on a 19 inch screen!

For those of you who like to know the technical specs, here is a list of the technical details of the PC, which I got from the HP site:

* AMD Turionâ„¢ 64 X2 Dual-Core TL-52
* 2048MB DDR2 SDRAM system memory
* 320GB hard drive
* Slot-loading SuperMulti DVD burner2 with LightScribe technology
* Touch enabled 19″ diagonal widescreen BrightView LCD
* NVIDIA GeForce Go 7600 graphics card with 256MB dedicated video memory (Up to 528MB Total Available Graphics memory as allocated by Windows Vistaâ„¢.)
* Integrated 1.3-megapixel HP WebCam with built-in array microphone
* HP SmartCenter Button to launch interactive mode with one touch
* NTSC TV tuner and over-the-air ATSC high-definition television tuner
* Wireless keyboard and mouse, stylus, and Media Center Remote Control
* 24 x 7 toll-free phone support and 1-year HP limited warranty

I swear, if I had $1,850 to burn, this PC is what I would buy, no question. For the time I had it, I couldn’t get enough. I’m 40, and my eyes aren’t that great anymore, so I really, really appreciated the brightness of the screen, and how huge the icons were. I never had to squint to find some tiny button to click. I got comfortable using the wireless mouse and keyboard, I had no problem uploading files from our home server that I needed, and it was FUN. OH, and the GAMES! HP has an awesome game page, and it came with free credits for unlimited play of any of the games. Chris and I played Zuma and had a blast! It was hard packing it back in the box and going back to my now-seems-so-small 15 inch laptop. Maybe one day the money truck will pull up outside my house, and I will run straight to Best Buy, and buy the HP Touchsmart PC! I would like to say one last thing to the wonderful people who contacted me and sent me the PC:

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