Hewlett-Packard announces the launching of its line of ultra-cheap notebooks and desktops today. It turns out Hewlett-Packard wants to put a little new life into the Compaq brand they have acquired back in 2002, positioning Compaq brand not only as a label for extremely cheap PCs but as one with mainstream appeal in the U.S. as well.

This time Hewlett-Packard will certainly attract a lot of buyers with its new bargains, Compaq CQ61z notebook and Compaq Presario 4010f. Compaq Presario 4010f is a 15.6-inch desktop with an AMD Sempron CPU, 2 GB of RAM, DVD burner, 250 GB hard drive, and discrete graphics that runs on Windows 7 Home Premium. The price starts at just $309 after a $100 rebate.

Compaq Presario Desktop

Compaq Presario 4010f desktop is available for purchase on Windows 7 launch day, October 22.

For those early adopters who want to upgrade to the latest and the greatest, here’s the first USB 2.0 HD-DVD drive from HP. The HD100 DVD-ROM, due by the end of the year, marks a shift of the company’s support for the next HD media from Blu-ray to HD DVD. The company at the same day announced the Pavilion dv9000t, also sporting the HD DVD drive. Interestingly, the image on HP site has a BD text label alongside with DVD & CD; perhaps the case is originally intended for Blu-ray. As for the HD playback, you will need at least a Pentium single-core 840 3.2Ghz or a AMD 64 X2 2.2Ghz in addition to a nVidia GeForce 7600GT or ATI X1600. External output will require a HDMI or HDCP-compliant DVI-D connection.

HP USB 2.0 HD-DVD Drive

The HD DVD, DVD & CD read speeds top at 2.4x, 5x and 14x respectively. 1x in HD DVD denotes 4560KB/s transfer rate. Double-layer DVD from both camps seems to be supported, but HP has yet revealed their speeds. LightScribe is absent in this model. The self-powered HD100 comes with a copy of CyberLink PowerDVD HD DVD Edition.