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…)

In case you’re new to the Tabletscape, I’ve put together a little Tablet PC Hardware Dictionary to help you find your way. This isn’t meant to incorporate every detailed spec but to give you a lighthearted overview of Tablet Hardware. Enjoy. Feel free to add to the dictionary with comments to this post.

Tabletscape - A parallel universe where ink is King, OneNote is Queen and guys like Kevin Tofel can be rock stars.

Slate Tablet - A PC running Microsoft’s Tablet PC operating system, which allows using a special pen and which does not have a built in keyboard. Often this is used by advanced tableteers seeking freedom from the tyranny of the Qwerty. (Example: Motion LS800)

Convertible Tablet - A PC running Microsoft’s Tablet PC operating system, which allows using a special pen and which has a built in keyboard. User often select convertibles as a hedge against learning to use the pen or if they have heavy data entry requirements. Convertibles are typically heavier than slates. Unlike cars, convertibles are not necessarily cooler. (Example: Lenovo X60 which may actually be cooler, go figure)

Hybrid Tablet - A PC running Microsoft’s Tablet PC operating system, which allows using a special pen and which has a detachable keyboard. Hybrids offer some benefits of both Slates and Convertibles. They also have a high cool factor and often a high cool factor price. (Example: HP TC1100, sadly discontinued)

Apple Tablet - See Fairytales, Myths and Legends. (Example: See Photoshop ’cause that’s the only picture you’re gonna get)

Dell Table - See Holy Grail

Keyboard - See Anti-Christ

Ultra Mobile PC (UMPC) - A smaller version of a slate tablet with a 7 inch touch screen and high cool factor, usually weighing less than 2 lbs. (Example: Samsung Q1)

The Perfect Carrying Case - See Holy Grail. Currently you can only use The Perfect Carrying case to carry the Dell Tablet or the Apple Tablet since none of these exist.

Active Digitizer - A tablet pc screen that responds to electronic impulses from the pen. Touching the screen with anything other than the pen has no effect. Active digitizers may be more accurate than touch screen input, until of course, you lose the pen. Then touch screens are always more accurate.

Touch Screen - A tablet pc screen that responds to touch input and does not require a special pen. However, many touchscreens can result in vectoring (stray inputs) from the users palm or heel of their hand. Please don’t use other body parts with your touch screen. Enough said.

EVDO - High speed cellular leash connection that allows broadband class speeds. Currently available in and around major cities with a special card. Mine works at the beach. Yours will only work at the beach if I’m with you.

Tablet Like PC - PC’s with specifications similar to a Tablet PC or UMPC but not running the MS Tablet PC OS. (Example: Sony VAIO UX280P or Flybook)

A 2 lb convertible tablet with a Pentium processor, high resolution touch screen, anti-vectoring features, daylight viewing angles, 8 hr battery life, WWAN, WIFI, Bluetooth, Windows Vista Ultimate with Aero and a 100mb hard drive for under $1,000. - Ha Ha Ha Ha ROTF LOL crying! It’s fun to dream!

Can a Tablet PC make you look like a celebrity?  All of these folks are big Table PC users. You be the judge.

First there’s Dennis Rice of Gottabemobile.com,

 who we all know looks like: Bill Clinton.

Then there’s Warner Crocker of Gottabemobile.com

who bears an uncanny resemblance to: Martin Mull

 We also have James Kendrick of JKontherun.com 

 who, once you get past the cartoon front, looks a lot like: Donald Sutherland

 Finally there’s me:

Buy Tablet PC, be a star, it’s simple.  No I don’t know Angelina Jolie. Leave me alone.

Photoshop was not used in the making of this post and no celebrities were harmed, however, if Donald Sutherland doesn’t get off my couch and quit using my Q1, I may hurt him!

Fujitsu is running an online holiday promotion through January 31, 2007. Buy a Lifebook notebook or Stylistic Tablet PC from www.shopfujitsu.com and get a free Creative Zen Nano 512 mb MP3 player. If that’s not enough, they are offering free shipping and no payments for 6 months on orders over $500. So if you’ve been thinking about a new P1610 like James Kendrick or a  Stylistic ST5112 like Kevin Tofel, this may be the time to buy. July will be the time to pay.

What? You don’t need an MP3 player because you have “The Zune”? I’ve got one word for you “re-gifting”. This way everybody wins. Your, Aunt/Uncle/Nephew/Black Sheep Brother, gets an MP3 player and you get a new tablet. What’s not to love?

I have said this before at my own blog, but I feel that I need to say it again, nobody can compete with Linda A. Epstein in making any UMPC or TabletPC look good. You don’t believe me? Check out this picture and others posted in her first look of a Lenovo new ThinkPad X60.

The Apple UMPC has been unleashed! It’s a bit bigger than we hoped, but its portable and its Apple. Isn’t that enough?! Kudos to the folks that put this project together… here’s to hoping it comes to a retailer near us soon (albeit in a slightly more svelt package).

Check it out right here.

This week I had the opportunity to attend the TabletKiosk Demo Days cocktail hour in Orlando.  And yes, it was indeed a cocktail hour with an open bar, but as I had to drive back to Tampa that night I didn’t avail myself of the free booze.  I did avail myself of the opportunity to chat with Martin Smekal, the President and CEO of TabletKiosk who was kind enough to show me the various eo UMPCs and Sahara Tablet PCs they had on display. (More…)

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