HP has churned out a number of multitouch-capable machines under the TouchSmart line, and the 20-inch TouchSmart 300 is its latest effort.

At $930 (as of 12/23/2009), it costs more than similarly-sized budget all-in-one PCs (20 inches or smaller), but also outperforms them all. It's score of 98 in our WorldBench 6 test suite edges out touch-enabled, budget-priced competitors like the 18.5-inch Dell Studio One 19 and the 20-inch MSI Wind Top AE2010. That performance is also tantalizingly close to pricier rivals like the 24-inch Sony Vaio L117FX/B; and actually faster than HP's own23-inch TouchSmart 600xt.

The star of the show is HP's custom TouchSmart software. It offers full-screen, touch-friendly widgets for media playback, browsing, and manipulating photos, and for accessing popular Web applications like Hulu, Pandora, and Twitter. But while the software is typically quite responsive, we found its performance on the TouchSmart 300 to be a bit sluggish.