Laptop upgrades are not difficult to complete yourself, and there are three key upgrades that you can easily accomplish to make your laptop run faster.  These will also give your laptop a higher resale value when you decide to replace it.

One of the most simple laptop upgrades to complete yourself is to upgrade your operating system. If you are running Windows XP or Windows Media Center, upgrading to Windows Vista is a good idea.  You will be able to take advantage of the many features of Windows Vista, as well as enhance the speed of your system.  An upgrade to Windows Vista for the Home Basic edition is under $100 and is worth it to enhance the efficiency of your system. (More…)

James Kendrick has been tearing into Vista lately here and here. I skipped whacking at the first one because I was busy at work and I didn’t want to pick on James in case he was having his meds adjusted.

You’re big boys and girls and can read, so I’ll spare you the full recap. The crux of James’s arguments are that Vista doesn’t run well on mobile devices. That we need a slimmed down Vista for mobile devices and that only Apple will get mobile devices right.

I disagree. Completely. Ok, I’m good. Anybody want a snack? Oh, why do I disagree?

Windows Runs Just Fine On My Q1
I went from an abysmal XP experience of double digit crashes a day to a MUCH better experience with Vista on an Original Q1 with 2 gigs of RAM. I can easily say that I’m more productive with Vista than with XP. Yes, I’ve tweaked settings. Big deal. I had to do that with XP too. After the tweaks I’m not getting the issues that James gets. Yes, plugging an external monitor in is less than stellar. It sucked on XP too. I’ve got an AutoIT script that fixes it for me. 5 seconds, done.

We Don’t Need a Slimmed Down Version of Vista for Mobile
Cough BS Cough

We need fewer versions of Vista but not a slimmed down version. I’d like to see one version of Vista. Just give everybody Ultimate and be done with it already. Why chop up the market? Microsoft products don’t sell when you take stuff out. Period. For every slimmed down piece James takes out, someone else won’t buy Vista because it’s missing that piece.

I am willing to see a install template for Vista that is optimized for mobile. Give people the choice of what to leave in and what to leave out along with what settings to optimize. Windows Mobile has never lived up to it’s potential because it can’t do everything full blown Windows can do. A slimmed down Vista for Mobile would end up in the same trap. As to the suggestion to put the OS in ROM, this has cause all kinds of grief for Windows Mobile, why would Vista in ROM be better? You’d piss people off because they can’t change the OS.

Hell Will Freeze Over To Cool The Batteries When Apple Rules Mobile
Steve Jobs owns a string of laser hair removal centers. After a MacBook take the hair off your lap, you need the rest removed to look normal. Apple is behind in heat dissipation design. Apple is using commodity hardware. Apple is subject to the laws of physics. Ergo, Apple won’t be solving any battery life issues any time soon.

I like and respect James and I appreciate his perspective and opinion. But he’s starting to sound cranky. Somebody at Gottabemoble send James a splotch to squeeze will ya!

Amazon launched an MP3 download service today. That’s right, MP3 as in no DRM. As in no iTunes store required. Oh and there’s no extra fee to take out the DRM. It looks like tracks are $0.99 each.

Amazon has now fired a shot across Apple’s bow. If Amazon Unbox wasn’t enough warning, Amazon is now going after Apple’s digital core.

Want proof? The free download to test your Amazon MP3 downloader is Energy by The Apples In Stereo. Does anyone really believe that this is a coincidence?

The beauty for me is that I don’t have to use the pig known as iTunes. I love the player agnostic part of this. This is a nice feature for my windows centric setup.

As for video I’ve had really good results viewing new pilots on Amazon Unbox. The process has worked well on both my UMPC and my media center TV. A 10′ interface for the TV would be nice but the UMPC was just fine.

Now I can stuff my UMPC and Smartphone with media. who needs to get work done!

Laptop Alarm is freeware designed to protect your portable computer. Simply turn it on to lock your UMPC when you walk away. If your machine is then turned off or disconnected from power a shrill alarm goes off. It works on any PC but why would you want anything other than a UMPC anyway?

I could see this being very useful for mobile types who occasionally have to walk away from their machine. Stall surfing notwithstanding, sometimes you don’t want to pack up all your stuff to run to the bathroom.

Vista is not listed as a supported OS but it works fine on my Q1 with Vista Biz.

The Q1 UMPC and I went to San Diego a week ago. I started to blog about it earlier but then I remembered my rule about not mixing bourbon and blogging, so I held back… from blogging that is. (In fairness, I did a lot of blogging about the conference at DynamicAccounting.net but it was an accounting software conference not mobile devices.)

What Worked

Battery Life - The Q1 ultra mobile performed flawlessly on the coast to coast flight. Both coming and going I used the Samsung power bank and landed with a completely full internal Q1 battery each time. I watched movies both ways and got caught up on my Ze Frank and Wallstrip. Battery life with the Samsung power bank gets an A+.

OneNote and HSDPA - In the sessions I was able to take notes all day in One Note and I carried around a much smaller bag than most of the attendees. When WIFI wasn’t available, a Bluetooth connection to the Samsung Blackjack PDA worked just fine.

Office 2007 - I got a free copy of Office 2007 at the conference and I was feeling adventurous (or stupid) so I downloaded the 600+ mb clogging up the hotel’s wired connection and did the install It worked pretty well. Despite my success I don’t recommend doing this with your primary PC while out of town. I blame the bourbon.

Microphone - Audacity and the Samson Q1U microphone worked great for podcasting. I snagged an interview with Mary Jo Foley. It’s not often you get to turn the tables and interview the press! (I found out why she doesn’t have a TV!)

What Didn’t Work…

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In the last few months I have been testing some GPS Software in my UMPC looking for the best or at least one that could be easily used in this kind of device. And I have ended using iGuidance 3. Why? You can find that here.

Now, I wonder what GPS program are you using guys?

The family and I are moving to a new house in a few weeks, but we’ve still got one to sell. So if you’re looking for a nice house in the Orlando area, drop me a line at mpolino at gmail dot com. You know that you’ve always wanted to move here. Do it now! But enough shameless plugging, my UMPC and OneNote 2007 in particular have been a huge help in this process.

So far I’ve:

1) Kept a list of maintenance items and supplies needed to finish off a few projects on the old house. All of these are now done, yeah!

2) Made notes during our discussions with realtors.

3) Drew a sketch of the new house with dimensions so we can see how furniture fits.

4) Laid out all the connections for the media closet I’m going have in the new house. My wife is finally sick of wires so everything is going into a close behind where the TV will get mounted with just IR repeaters sticking out of the wall.

5) Used PDF annotator to sign and return documents while we were negotiating on the new house.

6) Played music through the UMPC while working on all those projects.

Of course, now my Christmas light diagram that I did in OneNote last year is useless. I’ll have to do a new one this year.

So does anyone else have any suggestions or tips for using OneNote to help with a house move? If you do, add it as a comment to this post.

EverNote has a new beta out of the 2.0 release and it adds a bunch of new features.  This is one of the better note taking applications available and it’s very well suited to tablets and UMPCs.  It makes good use of ink and is the only major note taker that uses the “toilet paper roll” method of organizing your notes.  Each note appears at the end of the previous one and you can scroll through all of them quite easily.  This new beta release looks to add some very slick to features, too.  Check ‘em out below the cut. (More…)