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…)

I’ll admit my bias right away: I already have an HTC PocketPC. Despite all of it’s glaring little errors, I love the little guy. The screen is too small, the processor too slow and the built-in apps are too buggy. Does the new HTC PocketPC plus Windows Mobile 6 fix all of this? Possibly… I don’t know, but I’d sure like to find out!

The fine folks over at Mobility Site have an excellent unboxing/mini-review of the sexy little “UMPCjr” up right here. It sure does make me want to pull out the ‘ole credit card and over extend myself for an HTC Advantage. What’s the verdict?

Everybody in the house is mad at me over the iPhone No, we weren’t early adopters who got hosed by Steve. I opened my big mouth as a joke and convinced my non-techie mother to get an iPhone. Now the wife and kids are mad that she got one first! My  daughter argued that she needs and iPhone so that she can show my mother how to use hers. Good argument. Not a chance.

My mother is actually a good iPhone candidate. She wanted a “simple, no frills phone” but those don’t really exist any more. She’s been wanting an iPod for when she walks in the morning but she takes a phone as well for emergencies. She’s just getting into email and is a gmail user.

The iPhone is stylish enough for her. The basics are easy. She can get email, carry only one device when she walks and she’s getting a lot of attention with it. On the down side, she will need a case for carrying it in her purse and she often keeps a cell phone for 5 years (I know, how is that possible?!), so she may have battery issues down the road. Carrying around pictures of the grand kids is a plus I didn’t even consider until we hooked it up. I’m not sure that the over 60 set is Apple’s target demographic but now I’ve got an I phone to play with without giving up my regular phone.

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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The last week Origami Team member Dustin came back alive to OrigamiProject Blog and posted a little bit about Origamis Future.

In the coming year we’ll see new hardware manufactures enter the market, new designs that offer built in keyboard functionality, and even the reality of “always connected” with integrated 3G access. - He said.

Sounds good, but… The last Saturday I went to John U. Lloyd Beach State Park. This park is around 1.5 miles East of Fort Lauderdale International Airport, this Park is a piece of land/beach close to Fort Lauderdale from where the farer building is about less than a mile. And guess what, the signal on my Cingular Cell phone was poor. That poor that I almost could not get my emails via a BT GPRS connection. We are not talking here about the middle of California Desert, we are talking about South Florida Beaches ones of the most visited Beaches in the whole World. And I say South Florida Beaches because this is something that happens in almost everywhere in these Beaches. So, about what “all time connectivity” we are talking? The Cell Phone System in USA is Bad and Expensive. It’s at the same level than we see in some under developed Countries in Latin America. It’s not the Phone System that we see in Europe, Japan, Korea and even some parts of China.

To talk about to be connected all time we have to start talking about to get our phone system at the same level than in Europe. Then we can talk about “always connected” Origamis. Now, this is just a dream.

For those of you who like your placeshifting to be done by a PC rather than an external device, Orb 2.0 is now out of beta and available as a free download from Orb.com.

I use both Orb and a Slingbox and they both have positives and negatives. I’ve resisted the beta of Orb 2.0 only because I’ve been drowning in betas lately but once I get a minute, I’ll install the final version and do a review of how well it works on a UMPC.

I can say that Orb works better than Slingbox over GPRS on my phone, but the Sling has been easier for the kids to figure out.

I’ve blogged previously about my first Christmas with OneNote but this weekend the UMPC really came into it’s own. Sunday was Christmas shopping day. The kids were with my parents, so my wife and I had an early breakfast and while we were eating, we pulled out the Q1, reviewed the Christmas list in OneNote and speculated about where we would buy certain items and what they would cost. We then applied for a second mortgage online, right there during breakfast. (Just kidding, but not by much).

At Target we found the gaming chair my son wanted but it was more than I thought it should be. So, right there in the aisle, I surfed the web for my options. (Wal-Mart doesn’t sell gaming chairs, Best Buy’s chairs don’t have speakers or are pricey.) I was quickly convinced that what we had found was a reasonable price (grumble, grumble) and we bought the chair. I could possibly have done this on a Pocket PC style phone but not with the same browsing experience and big pictures.

The day went on like that. We were able to compare prices, find stores to touch things we had seen online, etc. When my wife needed a few minutes in a section not dedicated to electronics, I grabbed the Q1 and surfed the web. Why they have these other sections I’ll never know but I find that the Q1 makes waiting for anything infinitely more palatable. Perhaps the DMV should give them out in line?

There are some day to day activities were a UMPC really shines and this is one of them. In contrast, the Lenovo x60 for example, looks like a great tablet PC, but I don’t see many people, including myself, taking it Christmas shopping. Hey IBM, I am willing to give it a try though! Any UMPC however, should handle tasks like this with ease, oh yeah, at 1/2 the price. The UMPC lifestyle continues!

On the way home from work yesterday my car blew a radiator hose in one of the lesser parts of town. No, I’m not McGuyver, I didn’t fix the car using the neoprene sleeve from my Q1. I found a well lit spot to park it and called my wife and a tow truck. In the past I would have been, well, unhappy is the polite answer, pissed off is more like it. But not this time. While I waited for these two maskless, capeless superheroes to come rescue me, I simply pulled out the Q1, fired up the EVDO modem (via my Elan U132 USB adapter) and with a Slingbox connection I was watching Seinfeld on TBS. George was cheating on his IQ test and I was feeling pretty smart …and relaxed.

Could I have done this with a 15″ Dell notebook? Sure. Would it have fit comfortably in a place in the car? Not a prayer. Would a big bright laptop on the dashboard have screamed “Mug me” more than a discreet UMPC sitting well below the dash? I think so.

Apparently one of the benefits of a UMPC is that it can lower your blood pressure in certain stressful situations, if you let it.  My UMPC is quickly ceasing to be a device and starting to be a lifestyle.

By the way, my wife beat the tow truck and no authors were mugged in the writing of this piece.