Digital Trends

HP Compaq 2510p October 22nd, 2007 | by Josh Norem

Extras

The 2510p has some fancy doodads on it. One of the more interesting is an ambient light sensor that resides below the LCD. When you are running it off the battery it detects the amount of available ambient light and automatically adjusts display brightness. It works rather well too, and dims the display in low light and brightens it in well-lit environments to offer increased contrast.

Another interesting feature is touch-sensitive buttons for volume control. There’s a small, two-inch area at the top of the keyboard for volume, and you drag your finger back and forth across it to raise or lower volume. Sadly, it does not work very well. It senses your touch, but you then have to drag your finger over it again and again and again and again to get it to work. And then suddenly, the volume will rocket to the highest setting and vice versa. We would have preferred just a single touch-sensitive button for raise and lower, and think that would be easier to control. The Wi-Fi button is also touch-sensitive, which is slick but confused us at first since we’re used to either moving a physical switch or pressing Fn F2 or similar.

The touch sensitive volume controls (upper right)

One other sweet inclusion is the ability to tweak the BIOS from within Windows via the HP Tools software. You can change boot order, disable devices. And do anything else that is possible in the BIOS, all from within Windows. This is a feature we have waited a long time for, and we’re happy to finally see it come to fruition.

Free software?

Everyone hates bloatware, even HP apparently. As a service to its clients, the 2510p comes with a large bunch of software, but guess what? It’s not installed. Instead, HP gives you the option of installing what you want, which is brilliant. As a matter of safety, HP did install Norton Internet Security, but it’s not actually installed and activated. But it’s there in case you want it, but we don’t recommend this software for a number of reasons.

Software options