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…)

Sorry guys but the only news I have today is about myself

I just released today the final version of Inkoogle. It now includes a lot more search engines!

Inkoogle is a Universal Web Searching tool that supports Ink. It helps Tablet PC and UMPC Owners to search in all Google different types of search engines, including books, froogle, images, maps, video, etc. But that’s not all, you can search also in Wikipedia using the different languages available at this site, you use the Amazon Search Engine and you can use Pricegraber.com Search Engine for the different countries (languages) available on this site. This is why I call it Universal Web Searching Tool.

This tool is a freeware. You don’t pay nothing for it. But it includes my affiliated ID in some of these searches. This does not cost you anything also and it does not interfere in any way with your searches. It just help me to pay my bills so I can continue helping you and others with what I do in this and other sites.
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Before you read this, I know that I have left off some piece of tablet software that you dearly love. But for people looking to understand the basics of Tablet PC software, these apps will open enough doors that they will find whatever I left off. Feel free to tell me what I missed in the comments. (With attitude please!)

Ink Enabled - Software that allows you to interact directly in that program using ink instead of using middleman software like the TIP. See Below.

TIP - Tablet Input Panel. This is a small piece of tablet PC software that harnesses the full power of modern computing hardware, not to solve world hunger, but to convert the chicken scratch handwriting that you have leftover from being a lazy six year old into something that can be understood by a software application that is too dumb to simply let you use ink directly. But I’m not bitter.

Floating TIP - Yeah, it was like the TIP dude, but floating. Out there in the clouds. Above your cursor. Don’t you see it officer? Uh, they’re clove cigarettes. Yeah. You don’t see the floating tip man? Did you install it on your UMPC? It’s not there by default on a UMPC, only on a tablet. You have to like, install it separately dude.

Experience Pack/Education Pack/Touch Pack - In the early days of Tablet PC’s, software traveled in packs for safety. A pack provided some protection from the ravages of hungry software reviewers. An application was harsh and cold and deserved a severe review. Packs were warm and fuzzy collections of little apps, like bunnies. Easy to download and take home to your tablet named Sammy or Binky. The Touch Pack continued this tradition on the UMPC. It’s older siblings, the Experience and Education Packs are now in the wild for everyone to enjoy. But the Touch Pack is still only easily available on a UMPC.

Line Rider - Like Meth for a Tablet PC. Only better. All those other schmucks have to use a mouse to draw lines in this wildly addictive game. You get to use a PEN to DRAW. Why didn’t anyone think of this sooner!

OneNote 2007 - See OneNote 2003. See also Positive Effects of Steroid Use. OneNote 2007 is familiar enough that you won’t get lost and improved enough that you won’t go back. Just read some of the blogs by people smarter than me in the tablet space and you’ll see more than you ever wanted to know about how to use OneNote.

TEO 3.0 - Tablet Enhancements for Outlook. ”Yes that’s right dispatch, it’s Outlook alright. But it’s bigger somehow, and badder. Oh my god, it’s got a pen! Send backup!”  TEO turns Outlook into Rambo. Please buy this software. My wife will be mad if I make Josh Einstein move in with me and pay his bills so he can continue developing TEO. His wife will be mad too.

PDF Annotator - What Adobe Acrobat wishes it could be, on it’s best day, with a pen.

Windows Journal - OneNote, before it grew up. Still very nice, like playing Atari Flashback even though you own an XBox 360.

URotate - If you have a Q1(and I believe some other UMPC’s), this is like a Merry Go Round for your screen. Dump the default screen rotation and use this. Let the Q1 have a little fun!

(Note: Upon rereading this, I’ve found a surprising number of drug references. Perhaps that’s because I find the stupidity of drug use to be incredibly sad and use humor to poke fun at that stupidity. Perhaps its because Tablet PC’s are extremely addicting. Unfortunately, all of you will probably understand these references too.)

Apparently, I am unable to write a short post, deal with it. Let the long list of things I left off begin.

This is one of the coolest Windows Mobile apps i’ve seen in quite awhile.  It’s  Windows Live Search for Mobile, essentially mobile  version of Windows Live Local Search, which it itself similar to Google Maps combined with Google Earth.  With it, you can search for any address or business and view it on a map (regular or arial hybrid), but that’s just a start.  You can get instant directions from one location to another, see real-time traffic information, and if you have a GPS receiver, put all of that onto a real-time scrolling view of your exact location, which can include turn-by-turn driving instructions.  All of the data is downloaded on the fly, so you need a Windows Mobile device with a mobile data connection, preferably a PDA phone.

In trying it out, I found that sometimes my download speeds weren’t fast enough to quite keep up with my vehicle speed so some of the images would remain missing as I went.  Still, this is one of the more fun apps I’ve seen and it came out just in time for me as I’m headed to a city I’ve never been to before next week on a business trip. You better believe that this will be guiding me from the airport to my destination.  Pocket PC Thoughts has a nice review of the application here, and you can download it for free and try it for yourself (it’s in beta) here.  It’s available for Windows Mobile as well as J2ME phones.

Ilium Software is making a push to support UMPCs.  First, they came out with the InScribe on-screen keyboard to make text entry easier, and now they’ve released an open beta of eWallet 5.0, which has some new features particularly useful to UMPC users.  Of foremost interest is the ability to sync your eWallet files to multiple PCs, even over ftp, so if you’ve got a UMPC and a desktop PC, both can maintain the same eWallet information easilyt.  Of course, the Windows Mobile version is included as well so you’ll have your info where ever you go.  And although it’s got the word “wallet” in the title, this sort of software is useful for carrying all sorts of private data.  Not only credit cards, but logins and passwords, or PINs or any other confidential information that you need to keep secret, but you need to keep on-hand.  It’s an open beta, so go grab the 30 day trial and give it a go.  The folks at Ilium would love to hear how you like it as well.

Ilium Software eWallet 5.0

I have read some complains about how fonts in 800×600 resolution becomes too blur. This happens because of the stretching of the 800×600 resolution to fit in a 800×480 space. But this does not means that you can not mitigate this issue. One thing that I have done that helps me a lot is to tune Cleartype using this page while I have the UMPC at 800×600.

Try this and let me know what do you think.

Ed Holloway as announced a new little tool that is another of those simple programs that are destined to be a must have in any UMPC.

The tool lets you write search terms on a small form, and instantly send the terms to a Google search inside your default browser with one tap (or a gesture). No more awkward use of the Tablet Input Panel (TIP) inside a web page!!

This program is a freeware and can be downloaded here.

Since I saw the first UMPC I saw the big potential of these devices to become the perfect Carputer. Flux is releasing soon Centrafuse.

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