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 a headline entitled Do Over (presumably in reference to the TabletPCs perception as a mainstream failure), Business Week awards Microsoft with a prestigous “Most Innovative Company” award for their work on the UMPC.

“The Ultra-Mobile PC is portable, lightweight, and configured to connect on the go. It’s one example of why Microsoft is viewed as a market leader that takes existing market innovations and makes them right.”

Coming in at #6 on the list, Microsoft joins Apple, Google, GE and 21 other companies as a receipiant. Not bad for a little device that isn’t even out yet! See the full feature here.

As, uh, predicted, Ultranauts’ UMPC Prediction #10 (massive displacement) created a bit of an uproar. Then of course, as folks like the awesome Craig Pringle, immediately realized, the post had a singular purpose: get people to talk about the mobile computing market. And, boy did they talk. There were lots of lucid commentaries and disagreements and questions and thought. Quite frankly, it was excellent and prompted me to write about how proud I was to be a part of the extended mobile computing community.

And I still am proud to be. I just disagree with what I see as some (probably unintentional) hypocritical behavior and some soapbox shenannigans. For instance, I have yet to recieve any of the uncivilized, immature “can’t we all just get along” behavior that Dennis Rice thinks is so persistent. Nor have I seen the PMP fans or the PDA fans jump in to defend their platforms with such passion and determination.

I think that an email that I recieved from a self-described TabletPC fan makes a pretty good, if not slightly harsh point that I failed to consider:

“While I don’t think tablets will be completely pushed out of the market, you give Tablet PCs more credit than they deserve by putting them on the same list as PMPs and PDAs in the first place. It is hard to “displace” something that never really had a place to begin with. The TabletPC has never been more than a niche. It is not going mainstream anytime soon — which is why I suspect that Microsoft is launching the tablet v2.0 with the UMPC. If at first you don’t succeed, try and try again. Thanks for treating the TabletPC as a peer. I bet that both PDAs and PMPs have dramatically outsold TabletPCs.”

There is an irony in that email that strikes me as incredibly funny. This is a bit of the exact argument that the TabletPC community gave to as why the UMPC would not displace anything. I’ll paraphrase a couple of the mainstream site/blog rebuttals to Predictions #10:

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Another UMPC has been captured, tagged and released.

This particular sighting comes from the MakerFaire event where Microsoft reps were eagerly showing off the next-generation of mobile computing. Nothing really new or exciting is shown, but I can’t help but get excited by even the blandest of UMPC videos.

The backend improvements took an extra day or so, but it’s all for the better.

We’re back after a 3-day hiatus, but were now in a position to roll-out a lot of new site improvements and features in the weeks and months to come. It should be a lot of fun.

Oh yeah, we missed you too.

We’ll be having a little bit of downtime over the next 24 hours or so to do some back-end improvements to our rapidly growing community. It’s a necessary evil, but thanks for helping us grow!

You won’t see many posts for the next day, but we should be back up and running better than ever shortly. You will still be able to access the site and we still might sneak in a post, but please take advantage of our very brief break to peruse past articles you may have missed, leave some comments, vote in the poll and check out some of the other great UMPC blogs listed to the right.

Really, could you be a little more unappreciative? We toil and trouble, but you still demand more. And, franky, we’re more than happy to oblige! Ultranauts.com wants to be the best UMPC site possible, but we need your help.

This weeks poll asks where we can make improvements in our coverage. When the UMPCs start hitting, what information will be most important to you over the next several months? Reviews? News? Analysis? Something else entirely?

Let us know. This isn’t my site. It’s our site. Ultranauts unite!

The fine folks over at Origamiportal turn out to be developers at heart. They’ve got a nifty “Origamin Theme Creator” in development for the UMPC platform.

It’s a great idea that looks great too. And, by the sound of it, they’re not too far off from finishing it (or at least getting in into beta). That would be excellent timing given the coming fury of UMPC device launches coming up over the next couple of weeks..

As for developments left before release, I need to finish the specs on the XML file that will track all of the theme information and create functions for pulling the image data form multiple locations. Then the data will likely be saved in a zip file that can be uploaded and installed through the theme creator or by hand.

You can read more about it and see all the pretty screen grabs here. Great work, guys!