HP Touchsmart 610-1030uk all-in-one PC

Watch our video, above, to see what we made of HP's Touchsmart software.

Computer and software manufacturers like to promote the idea of using the Windows 7 operating system on a computer with a touch-sensitive screen, so you can drag your fingers over it to move the mouse pointer.

In theory this is more intuitive than a keyboard and mouse but we've never seen a computer on which it truly works, and HP's Touchsmart 610 is no exception.

For the £1,200 asking price you get a 23in 'all-in-one' PC, which combines the processing unit and the aforementioned touchscreen into a single device, a wireless mouse and a wireless keyboard. There's also a Windows Media Centre remote control, which is useful for watching internet TV and playing DVDs.

HP has installed its Touchsmart software but for us, this software is little more than an ugly interface with some fairly basic programs such as a recipe finder, games and creative and social tools. The touchscreen might necessitate the Touchsmart's simplified, childish interface, but we can't excuse the bugs that cropped up throughout.

Take the Recipe Box software, for example. Presumably the idea is that this computer can be put in the kitchen and users can follow the recipes as they cook. But the touchscreen doesn't work that well if you have wet or damp hands, which you might well do if you are cooking, and more importantly we can't imagine many people would want to use such a powerful and expensive PC in the kitchen.

We tried to add our own recipe with a picture of the dish but, for some reason, adding the image stopped the recipe editor from working and randomly changed the image on another recipe. For the included software to be so slap-dash simply isn't acceptable.

The included games are little more than, and less fun than, free Flash games you can play online. The software insists that they are played in full-screen mode which only made them look worse. All in all, the needlessly simplified Touchsmart software was hugely underwhelming.

Paradoxically, underneath all the fripperies, the Touchsmart 610 is very powerful. The 3.2GHz Intel Core i5-650 processor is combined with a large 6GB of memory and a 1,500GB hard disk. It can create and play all CDs and DVD, and it can play but not create Blu-ray discs. Given its large screen it was good for watching videos, especially with the inclusion of the Blu-ray player and the remote control, but although the screen quality was fine we've seen better on other computers.

Gaming performance was decent - it has an ATI Radeon HD 5570 graphics card with 1GB of memory and had no problem playing recent, demanding titles in our tests, albeit with some detail levels turned down.

The main problem with this computer is that the touchscreen adds to the price without adding a lot of value. We constantly found ourselves going back to the keyboard and mouse as they were both more comfortable to use and more practical. We also found that the screen got too grubby whenever we used the touchscreen, no matter how clean our hands. The built-in speakers were underwhelming.

In summary, it's just not worth paying £1,200 for this computer - a cheaper, more powerful desktop or a big, powerful laptop will be much better value.