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…)

The Asus R2H is going to come bundled with some extra goodies…

InterVideo announced today that ASUSTeK is bundling InterVideo Home Theater with the R2H UMPC. InterVideo Home Theater provides a total solution for multimedia entertainment from watching TV to viewing photos, listening to music and watching DVDs.

I expect that we’ll see many more “bundle” offers as the next-generation of UMPCs begin to hit the market. This is a good trend.

And here’s our first glimpse of Yahoo’s UMPC. Speculation is that this could hit in the first half of 2007. I want one (or two).

More interesting information is coming out of IDF (Intel’s big developers forum). This time Yahoo has a mysterious new application aimed specifically at the UMPC. Here’s a summary of the super-secret project.

Yahoo! that it has created ‘Go for UMPC’ especially for Intel. It turns out that this product must have been the mysterious GUI for the Ultra Mobile PC (UMPC) that Intel’s Mooly Eden had previously alluded to. Intended as a way of putting an ‘internet experience’ onto a device as small as a UMPC, Yahoo!’s Go for UMPC was distinctly under-whelming in its demo.

Yep, this only raises more questions. What does Yahoo’s “Go for UMPC” do? What does this GUI look like?

Hot off of yesterday’s announcement that Intel is accelerating the availability of “all-day” UMPC chips (aka chips that can go for 8+ hours on a single charge), is this little bit about Sierra’s support for embedded 3G connectivity in future UMPC designs.

“Sierra Wireless is pleased to collaborate with Intel to provide seamless 3G-enabled connectivity options for the UMPC platform,” said Trent Punnett, Senior Vice President, Marketing and Corporate Development for Sierra Wireless. “Bringing high-quality 3G connections to Ultra Mobile PC devices allows for true on-the-go applications. We believe this will lead to the development of many innovative mobile devices, and we look forward to working with our OEM customers to bring these leading edge products to market.”

Wide-area mobility options are something that was sorely missed on the first and second batch of commercial UMPCs. At least Sony’s UX180P has an embedded option for Cingular’s 2.5G EDGE service. Hopefully, the Sierra Wireless options will enable EVDO on the UMPC without the need for external dongles.

I’m impressed with Intel’s recent pushes in the UMPC marketplace. Where is Microsoft? Read the full press release here.

Intel is giving the UMPC platform an extra push that will have new, more efficient and powerful mobile processors avaialble years earlier than originally planned. The first of this “next generation of UMPC hardware” hits in 2008.

“Intel has increased its investments in a low power processor that aims to deliver all day battery life to portable devices like the Ultra Mobile PC (UMPC). Intel’s ultra mobile processor aims to deliver a reduction in power consumption by a factor 10 over the technology that was available in 2005, enabling 7 hours of battery life. The chip will measure one seventh of the size of today’s models.”

This is huge! The UMPC is set to take off if it can make it through it’s first formative years. Read the full rport via IT Week.

TabletKiosk is living up to its name as one of the top marketers of the UMPC platform. To celebrate their current line of eo UMPCs, TK is hosting a series of events across the country, including Houston, Anaheim, Ft. Lauderdale and Orlando. Here’s the deets:

“The TabletKiosk Demo Days Roadshow is open to all UMPC enthusiasts, Windows® XP Tablet Edition fans and TabletKiosk customers. Please join us for these hands-on seminars where you will have the opportunity to see and try out the full line of TabletKiosk products, chat with members of the TabletKiosk team and meet some of your fellow Tablet PC and UMPC enthusiasts. In addition, all attendees will have the opportunity to win a $300 gift certificate to the TabletKiosk.com web store.”

You can register here! Tell them that Ultranauts sent you… and try not to drink all of their beer!