In May 2020 I heard from a correspondent in Austria who had pressed a t510 into service as a thin client. His main application was video editing and he decided to use the t510 to provide a secondary screen on his main system. You can read about it here
I subsequently heard from him about setting one up with Slax and using it as a media player and web browser. You can read about it here
In November 2020 I heard from Marlon about using the t510 as a Media Player. As part of this exercise he installed the 64-bit version of WES7. This is described here
As one would imagine with a reasonable video editing setup his main workstation is powerful and hence heat-producing and noisy. He's distanced himself from it to gain a quiet working environment - his main monitor at his desk is connected to the workstation via a 15M active Display-Port cable. The t510 provides an easy and silent way of adding a second display.
The t510 he got hold of was running Windows CE and BIOS v1.03. This he upgraded to ThinPro 5.2.0. - ThinPro so he could use HP's RGS (Remote Graphics Software) software. - downloadable using the ThinClient EasyUpdate application. He also upgraded the BIOS to v1.05 as it (possibly) addresses an issue to the NIC's MAC address turning into all zeros.
As to the updates he wrote:
Using the HP ThinUpdate application it was easy to download the newest ThinPro 5.2.0 for this ThinClient.
I tried the BIOS update with xterm but failed due too little knowledge on my part of how to set the paths and mounting commands. I tried a DOSflash update using (what turned out to be) an incomplete DOS floppy copy on USB stick. The DOS had no fdisk installed. Finally I did the BIOS upgrade with FreeDOS and the DOSflash BIOS image file.
The thing I found very interesting was what he encountered along the way:
When I swapped the two DVI connectors to rearrange my two monitors suddenly the NIC was dead. No LEDs activity anymore.
I had the same dead NIC phenomenon when I tried the DOSflash update. After aborting the experiments with this DOS copy the NIC also was dead.
The third reason I found for a dead NIC is deep sleep status while in screensaver mode. When it is on long enough the unit cannot be brought back to normal status.
In every case the NIC could be brought back to life: "I removed the CMOS battery, waited 2 minutes and reinserted it. NIC works again."
He concluded with "I will now see if the issues with the dead NIC reappears. However I have found a stable configuration which is not likely to trigger this issue. I have now turned off the screensaver".
This odd behaviour of the NIC certainly supports Thomas's experience that he reported back in 2012. At least we now know now the way to bring it back to life if it happens. (See the bottom of the 'hardware' tab).
My correspondent then moved on to the performance aspects of his setup:
I connect the Thin Client to the workstation with a local Cat5e LAN cable, no WAN involved.
Advanced Video Compression does work and the picture quality is slightly better than with HG3 codec. But there is an unacceptable delay making it unusable on this hardware. The third alternative to the HG3 and AVC codec is the lossless JPEG codec. But it requires too much computing power and Video playback only works in acceptable quality if the video size is small. HP3 with about 80% quality setting is my best setting. Reducing the Audio sampling rate and or switching to Mono does not improve the picture quality a lot.
Increasing the VIDEO RAM in BIOS does not help to get a better picture quality or better codec performance.
I tested a MTU of 9014 as my Workstation can do it. Video Performance did not benefit. Looks like the HP3 codec is already optimised to an MTU of 1500.