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…)

Pocketables is reporting that Sam the Samsung Q1 mascot needs some time with Outlook. Apparently, Samsung is still taking entries for it’s Q1 contest that was supposed to end on 12/17/06. So hop in your De Lorean, turn back time and enter here. Funny thing, none of the winners from past weeks are posted on the site yet. Sam, bad dog, learn some html and update that site!

I don’t care what holiday you actually celebrate at this time of the year. The lowest common denominator between them all is the spirit of giving and receiving. Specifically, Ultranauts wants to if you were a good little boy or girl this year, finding a slick new UMPC in your stocking? Or were you a bit more naughty, only finding coal or *gasp* a Tablet?

Let us know!

As an early adopter of many, many gadgets, I’ve been confronted by many, many questions regarding the strange and wonderous toys I pull out in airports, tradeshows or corporate meetings. In the early days of MP3 Players, PDAs and PMPs, I was a gadget rockstar… the envy of less-fortunate geeks everywhere.

Do you experience this with the UMPC? Do people stop you and ask you about your new toy? Are you constantly giving tech demos to complete strangers?

Or are UMPCs too much like the ubiquitous laptop, PDA or cellphone? Answer the new poll and let us know!

The Organic website pointed me to Sam, the new St. Bernard mascot for Samsung’s Q1 Notepad, er UMPC. I still love Notepad PC. I’m going with that. But I digress,  I would have thought a Yorkie would be more in the Q1’s weight class but it’s pretty cool to see it hanging around the dog’s neck in place of the barrel.

The premise is Sam to the rescue with the Q1. The videos are a hoot and even better, Samsung is giving away 2 Q1’s a week from now until December 17. Talk about a Merry Christmas! Do the winning units come with drool?

According to a report published in Digital Times, Asus has sold 40,000 R2Hs since September… that’s 20,000 more than the company’s sales estimate. And that’s just Asus! In my opinion, Asus has released a lot less units than Samsung, whose Q1 has been sold online and in retail stores since this Summer.

So, are UMPCs a fiasco? Well, beside what was predicted by some magazines and the criticism of pages like engadget.com, it seems to me that these numbers are really good numbers!
[Thanks to Carrypad.com for this tip]

All the big financial magazines are jumping on the UMPC bandwagon. First it was Fortune. Now it is Forbes (via the AP). This time around, Forbes is reviewing the ill-named PepperPad. The bottom-line?

On the whole, the Pad is a respectable try, but I slightly preferred Samsung’s UMPC despite its failings (like the lack of a keyboard). That’s mainly because it was possible to install familiar Windows software on the UMPC, and easier to transfer music and videos from my desktop PC.

If you ask us (and, yes, we know you didn’t), the PepperPad is an underpowered mess. It may look “neat” on paper, but when it comes to power, functionality, expandability, and just about everything else, the PepperPad comes up short. Oh, and it’s ugly. Plus, any branding folks assoicated with the naming of this device should be fired.

Read the full review via Forbes.

Kids, look away. Ultranauts is about to cuss. SON OF A BITCH!

We just found out Woot! offered and sold out of the Samsung Q1 UMPC today. Yes, it is a refurbished unit, but at $750 bucks, this one makes a lot of sense. I would have picked a Q1 up to supplement my collection of mobile gadgets, but I was a wee bit late on the trigger.

I guess the early bird gets the worm and all that crap. Maybe the Asus R2H will see a similar Woot! deal in the coming months.