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…)

A few weeks ago I was writing about Samsung Q1 and I was complaining about how bad the handwriting looks in this device. Being used to how it looks in a TabletKiosk eo v7110 I was expecting the same quality so I was in shock to see how different it was in this new to me device. I also was surprised to see that nobody before ever mentioned this issue that to me is a major one and responsible for how some TabletPC features do not work in Q1 in the way they are supposed.

Why the handwriting in Q1 looks that bad? Right after my comment I got the answer: This issue, “crappy looking handwriting”, is due the touch drivers/bios. q1 doesn’t have tablet os HID drivers but uses “normal” touch drivers.

I know what some Q1 owners may be thinking now - we can live with that - but that’s not all. According to one of the Origami Team member “because the Samsung Q1 doesn’t have some required firmware for HID digitizers you don’t get the floating TIP, Touch Pointer, etc.”

There are a few workarounds that Q1 owners have found to live with these issues but for me that’s not enough. From where I’m from people say that “a Baby won’t eat if he does not cry” so I’m asking Samsung: when are you thinking to fix this issue? What do you think? Do you think that it’s users’ responsibility to go around looking for solutions to what you have left unfinished? Where are the HID Drivers for Q1?

James Kendrick writes of a problem with Spybot Search and Destroy for Tablet PC users: 

The latest updates for the anti-spyware program “Spybot Search and Destroy” (http://www.safer-networking.org/; most updates dated 3 November) seem to recognize some key Tablet PC functionality as a threat and delete it.  The damage can be undone with Windows XP System Restore.

Spybot detects what it refers to as “Smitfraud-C.Toolbar888″, and flags the following registry entries as problems:

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\WinLogon\Notify\TabBtnWL
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\WinLogon\Notify\Sebring

It offers to fix the “problem”, and if you then re-boot you find that the “Change tablet and pen settings” icon is missing from the tray and many Tablet buttons are disabled (on Motion Computing LS800 the Escape, Function, 5-way directional control button, Motion Dashboard button and Rotate Display button, yet the programs seem to launch properly if invoked by clicking on shortcuts).

System Restore to a time immediately before running Spybot fixes the problem.

Source: jkOnTheRun

One of the problems I have with UMPCs and other small Windows XP-based computers is that XP was never really designed to run well on a small screen or with a relatively limited display resolution.  Even at 800×480 some dialog boxes are cut off and many programs just don’t work as well as one might like.  That resolution is actually plenty big enough for most tasks, but the Windows XP User Interface (UI) just doesn’t make good use of it.  And I have some bad news… it’s worse in Windows Vista.  The new version of Windows is even more geared toward large monitors running at high resolutions.

So what to do?  (More…)

TaskSwitcher is one of those little programs that once you use it one time you can’t live without it.

TaskSwitcher is a small application specifically written for UMPC touchscreen computers that gives you instant access to various useful functions that are otherwise a little more tricky on a computer without a keyboard.

TaskSwitch is a freeware and can be downloaded here.

Vista is almost here and while it sure looks nice we know that, like previous versions of Windows, it’ll be somewhat bloated, insecure and buggy. Mac-heads and Linux-geeks will continue to laugh at every flaw found while pointing out that their favorite operating systems seem immune. But why? Are the Microsofties somehow less competent than the boys in Cupertino or the lonely shut-ins (I’m assuming) that cobble together Linux? Nope, at least I don’t believe so. A big part of the problems we see in Windows has a single cause: backward compatibility.

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I have seen a lot of people asking “How do you install programs in a UMPC if they do not have CD/DVD Drives? And believe me, there are many different ways to go around this task but I’ll show today using a series of screen shots how to use a little tool from Microsoft to mimic the existence of a CD Drive in your UMPC.

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Do you want to know how Vista performs in a Tabletkiosk i7210? Check this Video shot by JKK where you can see Media Center and other applications in action.