Yep You Got Ripped,
Computer repair shops here in ther US don't order replacement parts from China. There are several wholesale distributors right here in the US not to mention retail stores that have most anything they need or could possibly order from China. And there again, the shipping and import fees would cost more than the motherboard itself if shipped from China. HP and Compaq are the same company. They just sell under different brand names. They flooded the market for years with these Compaq Internet PCs and thats about all they had the power to do, browse the web and do email. People try to run more high performance programs like photo editing or MS Office or better yet, video games. So they end taking their computer to a shop wanting to increase it's power and this is not possible as these computers are not designed to be upgraded more than adding a little memory. The computer shop talks them into letting them build them a high performance computer to run these programs and games. 9 times out of 10, that person just gives that old Compaq to the repair shop to avoid all the inviromental laws involved in just throwing it away.

Sorry this happened to you, rlj1959