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…)

Many people have heralded the New York Times reader as a fabulous piece of software for demonstrating new Windows presentation options. They’re right. It’s a great app. But what if you don’t want the overhead of .net 3.0 on your UMPC? Maybe you just don’t want the NYT. Another, slightly lower tech, option from our friends in Canada is a daily PDF formatted for easy reading.

The Toronto Star now has a free, lighter PDF version available daily. They send you an email with top stories of the day and you can select to download various PDF versions from a basic paper of 8 pages to a more bulked up one with 12. If you have PDF Annotator you can even do the crossword and Soduku in ink on your tablet PC or UMPC. This version is designed for commuters so the downloads are fast, it’s easy to read and well, unlike RSS feeds, it feels like a newspaper. You also won’t have to worry about folding it or smacking your neighbor on the train. I hope more news outlets will look at options beyond the web page. You can check it out here.

(Full disclosure: I work for a small subsidiary ultimately owned by the parent of the Toronto Star. In comparison we’re sort of like a pimple on the a.., never mind, you get the picture. I don’t work on the news side and I’m a 1,000 miles from Toronto. Ultimately, they still pay my salary, hence the disclosure.)

In Part 1, I talked about the problems with POP3 and IMAP email and suggested trying a Hosted Exchange account to get around them.  In Part 2, I’ll cover their advantages.

The advantages are plenty. When you access your email from your UMPC, it’s all there, including emails you sent from another computer. Emails you read already are marked as read and any you’ve sorted or filed are filed just as you left them. And your email is safe on the server. Should your hard drive crash on one of your PCs, you won’t lose a single message. There are some other benefits, too. You can access your email from any computer anywhere using Outlook Web Access, which closely resembles the interface of Outlook 2003. If you have a Windows Mobile PDA or Smartphone, you can sync it directly to the Exchange server, without having to connect it to a PC. Depending on your cellular service provider, you can even get “push email”, where your email is synced to your PDA as soon as it arrives. No more Blackberry envy! Exchange will store and sync more than just email, too. It also supports your contacts, calendar, tasks, and notes. And if you don’t happen to have Outlook, many hosted Exchange providers will give you a copy for free when you sign up for their service.

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So you’ve got your UMPC and you’re mobile and you’ve got your data access; maybe 3G cellular or a Wi-Fi hotspot. Naturally you want to check your email; grab your latest messages and perhaps reply to a few. OK, so far. You do what you need to do, but then what? What happens when you get back home to your desktop PC and access your email there. Do you have to download your mail again? And try to figure out which ones you’ve already read and which ones you haven’t? And then go though the process of sorting or filing it again as well? What about emails you sent from the UMPC? Do you have them on your desktop if you need to reference them? If you’re using a standard POP3 email account, you probably do have to have re-mark it as read or sort and file your email and items you sent on one computer aren’t on another. With a POP3 email account, you download your email to each computer from which you access your account and then anything you do to work with your email on that computer happens only on that computer. Since very often your UMPC isn’t your only computer, that situation is less than optimal nor is it particularly efficient. Fortunately, there’s a better option.

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