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 know what you’re thinking: Speak-n-Spell 2.0! Unfortunately, that’s not the case. What we’ve got here is the soon-to-be DOA StudentMate, a UMPC-like device that doesn’t really pass the test. Sure, it has a touchscreen and weighs less than 2 pounds. But that’s where things begin to go downhill…

“It has 128MB of memory, no HDD, but the memory is expandable by both SD cards and USB. As far as software goes it has a web browser, word processor, spread sheet software, contact list, a clock and calendar. For students there is also a calculator, typing tutor, home work helper, student summary list, and a mail client.”

Cool. A homework helper and a typing tutor? How very Mavis Bacon of the device to include some old-school keyboarding instruction. We could go on, but you can read more tragic “My1stUMPC” news over at Slashgear.

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.

Kevin Tofel of JKontherun seems to have the cleanest round up of the new Apple products announced today so I’ll point you there. The iPod Touch looks cool with many of the plusses of the iPhone without the phone part to slow you down.

I still hate that pig of an app known as iTunes so I don’t plan on changing any time soon. I am still frustrated with my Blackjack. I still have problems with Bluetooth stereo headsets and my battery is about 1/2 of what it once was but unlike iPods, I can buy new batteries and install them myself!

How to save $10 million…

Don’t build products in secret. Get the community involved before the thing is done.Yes, this might even work for Apple!

James Kendrick takes on Vista and mobile devices in his post JK opinion- Vista will never run well on mobile devices.

I disagree with some significant portions of James’ argument. So here goes:

“First and foremost in the area of performance.  I have not seen adequate performance running Vista on anything less than a Core 2 Duo processor. ”

James, every day Vista runs just fine on my original Q1. I’ll put my app usage up against anyone but a developer. Every day I run Outlook, ERP, SQL, Firefox/IE, Excel all at the same time, often with Live Writer and OneNote open too.

I agree that 512k isn’t enough. 1 gig of RAM ran fine for me. 2 gigs in the Q1 is beautiful. I hit 100% on the processor long before I use up the RAM now.

I also agree that the new Intel mobile processors, the A1xx series, can’t keep up. I think they were a response to the threat from VIA and that they sacrifice too much performance for a boost in battery life.

“If you use Sleep and Resume you quickly fall victim to the dreaded Vista la-la land where the device fails to resume properly.  Sometimes the device comes back fine but without a screen which is oh so useful.  Other times it comes back but hangs the entire device up in just a few seconds.  Both of these situations require a hard boot by turning off the power, which not even the OS likes, and then sitting through a boot time even longer than normal.”

I don’t see this issue. I’m sure that I don’t sleep and resume as much you do during the day but I do sleep the machine several times a day, every day. Right now I’m rebooting a lot less than once a week with typical usage at 10-12 hrs per day. I do see hiccups, sometimes the touch screen doesn’t come back. Re-resuming fixes it. Switching from external monitor to the internal LCD takes too long but it almost never fails to come back from resume.

The icing on this flickering cake is when Vista fires up the UAC in the middle and asks for permission to continue.  This fires off additional rounds of screen flickering and disk thrashing enough to give the user concern that the system is going to hang up.  Just for grins I’ve refused the permission request to see what would happen and you get the same flickering and disk thrashing just to get back where you started.  How silly is that?

Why the heck are you still running UAC? Are you simulating an ordinary user? You’re a bright guy. You don’t visit dangerous sites or open suspicious email. I get the occasional disk thrashing but since applying some of the changes that ctitanic and others have mentioned it’s greatly reduced. I see it when I connect and disconnect my monitor but not when I stick to being docked or undocked and it’s not any worse than XP. The playlist function in the Origami Experience is a performance pig with large playlists but its only that app.

So here’s my final take. I remember that before I switched to Vista my XP install had become so unstable that I couldn’t get through a day without several reboots. I remember the frustration of navigating XP with a pen. I’m quite happy with Vista despite the quirks. It could be that I came off of a Dell laptop running a Pentium M at 1.2 ghz so the move down to the Q1 wasn’t as painful as it could have been (with 512k it WAS painful.)

Now James, I know you’ve used Vista on more mobile devices than anyone so how about this? You send me a few, maybe the P1610, the Q1P, the R2H and I’ll try Vista on them. If I don’t like the way Vista runs, I promise to send them back to you.  

Virgin America is my new favorite airline. Even though I’ve never flown on it. Even though they don’t fly out of Orlando (Yet! Sooner or later everyone flies out of Orlando).

Why? Well, as Wired is reporting, they are using Motion Tablet PC’s to manage in flight ordering and entertainment. Kudos for the Tablet PC usage.

Plus, the Wall Street Journal reported that they are using Microsoft’s Dynamics GP for their financial system. (Shameless plug, I have a Dynamics GP dedicated site at (www.DynamicAccounting.net).

It’s like Richard Branson is reading my mind. In case Richard Branson IS reading my mind, hey Richard, turn on the in-flight WiFi, start an Orlando to Vegas route and give me two free first class tickets. My wife will take any extra Motion tablets you have and you can blame it all on James Kendrick.