HP Omen 15 Gaming Notebook Review, A Bit Of Mojo And Voodoo

The HP Omen 15 runs Windows 8.1 and comes with a complement of HP software, as well as the usual trialware. PC makers in general have a bad rep for installing unnecessary, sometimes intrusive apps, but I wouldn’t say that the "freebies" on the Omen rise to the level of bloat. Some of the installed programs are actually pretty handy.

17 Omen
If you've been a fan of boutique PC builders, you'll recognize the logo on the Omen's Desktop from VoodooPC days.

HP Omen Control handles you key customizations and the Omen’s slick lighting system. You can control the brightness of the LEDs and choose whether the speakers are “animated.” When animated, the speaker lights pulse to the beat of the music you’re playing. You can choose from tons of different colors for several sections of the keyboard, the power button, and the P keys. Or, you can give everything the same color and call it good.

18 Omen

19 Omen     20 Omen

Omen Control’s Key Assignments page gives you a map of your P keys and lets you assign keys and macros to them. The P keys also support Shift+P, Function+P, etc, so you can have more than one action tied to each of the six P keys. And Omen Control lets you create multiple profiles so you can change what each P key does depending on the game you’re playing at the moment.

21 Omen 22 Omen

23 Omen 24 Omen

HP also tosses in its Performance Advisor, Recovery Manager and HP Support Assistant tools, which are useful for finding your notebook’s serial number, updating drivers, system recovery, and the like. Trial versions of McAfee Central and Microsoft Office 365 are some of the bigger names among the freebies.

Joshua Gulick

Joshua Gulick

Josh cut his teeth (and hands) on his first PC upgrade in 2000 and was instantly hooked on all things tech. He took a degree in English and tech writing with him to Computer Power User Magazine and spent years reviewing high-end workstations and gaming systems, processors, motherboards, memory and video cards. His enthusiasm for PC hardware also made him a natural fit for covering the burgeoning modding community, and he wrote CPU’s “Mad Reader Mod” cover stories from the series’ inception until becoming the publication editor for Smart Computing Magazine.  A few years ago, he returned to his first love, reviewing smoking-hot PCs and components, for HotHardware. When he’s not agonizing over benchmark scores, Josh is either running (very slowly) or spending time with family. 

Related content