After years of dealing with HPs from my parents, I finally saved up and built my own, made just for me.
It feels good now, because it's not a big hunk of plastic. My mom's HP case is friggin' huge, but yet when you get inside it, you notice that the only reason it's huge is for all of the HP designed aesthetics around it, for instance... a 4 inch plastic barrier on the front, covering the floppy drive in plastic. Besides that, most of them come overpriced with very bad deals nowadays. I built my PC for about 1000$, and I got everything I wanted. GREAT video card, great audigy soundcard, Logitech speaker system (Z-5300s rock and they are affordable), a very nice black case, and a load of other stuff. Yet you go and see a price on a new pc at about 999.99$ and it consists of 2.4ghz (Mine is 2.8) 512 ram (1024mb here), and get this... ADVANCED GRAPHICS TECHNOLOGY.
My friends had the ADVANCED GRAPHICS TECHNOLOGY on the front when his parents bought it, and guess what... when I went down there and he had bought a brand new Geforce 4 Ti4600, turns out he did not even have an AGP slot on his motherboard, that's how cheap these Hewlett Packard people are.
Okay, just my two cents. I'll never buy a pc again, unless it's built at my hands. Not even an alienware, I don't have 2300 dollars for a PC that glows.