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…)

Propstm.net has published a review about of Samsung Q1b UMPC. This is the second UMPC in the market using VIA C7 processor and the first one fully configured to use this processor at highest level. That review shows you some benchmark results where you can see the Q1b out performing the eo v7110 in both, graphics and performance tests. The Q1b is currently the UMPC with better Battery Life in the market.

I’m really impressed but at the same time I was not expecting anything else from Samsung which as a lot more experience and resources than Amtek.

Way to go Samsung!

I’ve been playing with a new toy for the last couple of days — the Stowaway Sierra Bluetooth keyboard from Mobility Electronics (aka ThinkOutside, aka iGo).  It’s a very small yet full-sized keyboard which can be connected via Bluetooth to UMPCs, Tablet PCs, PDAs, and SmartPhones.  It comes with drivers for Windows XP, Windows Mobile, Palm OS, and Symbian.  In fact, it includes several specialty keys made specifically for Windows Mobile (Pocket PC or Smartphone), but will work just fine on the other devices.

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With the domestic release of the R2H, all of the origianally promoted UMPCs are officially out. Wave 1 of the UMPC revolution is complete. Now the question becomes… are you buying? And, if so, when? Answer our new poll (at the right) and tell us when (if ever) you plan to invest in the UMPC platform. Then come back here and tell us why you voted the way you did.

The fine folks over at onlyUMPC have not only unboxed their new UMPC, but they have given the sexy little device its very first user rating. The bottom-line? The Asus R2H received an admirable 4 out of 5 stars. Keeping the newest member of the UMPC family from achieving a perfect score were issues with processor speed and an amazing amount of uneccessary applications and processes loading at boot-up. Sounds like some serious effort is required to purge the R2H of it’s excess baggage. Is the R2H really the closest thing yet to UMPC perfection?

Read the full review to find out and then make your thoughts known.

I was reading all news relative to UMPCs today when I found this article from DailyTech reporting about OnlyUmpc’s R2H review. The whole article was ok until I read the following note:

While UMPCs are intriguing devices, they haven’t quite lived up to expectations when it comes to sales. The high price of entry is one of the reasons and meager battery life is yet another. With customers having access to $500 notebooks from reputable manufacturers, $1,000 for a UMPC seems like a hard pill to swallow.

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Glyn Evans from Pocket PC Solutions sent me a few pictures of a Concept Case with a Fabric Keyboard made by Eleksen.

According to Glyn this keyboard even sounds like a real one when a Key is pressed.

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Since the first day when IE 7 was released UMPC  owners have complained because Tip does not work properly when it’s used within IE7. Today Microsoft has confirmed this issue.

We were able to reproduce this problem. Our initial investigation indicates that something is misconfiguring the Tablet OS by turning off support for advanced text insertion into all applications. This is completely unsupported on a Tablet PC and we’re working to track down how this setting got turned off. In the meantime, I’d like to confirm that this is the entire cause of the problem you are seeing.

Please can you check this setting:

Control Panel -> Regional and Languages Options -> Languages -> Details -> Advanced -> “Extend support of advanced text services to all programs”

This checkbox should always be checked on a Tablet PC. If it’s not, please try checking it, rebooting and then see if the problem in IE7 evaporates.

Thanks, Adrian.

I have suffered from all kind of problems with IE7 from Java scripts that worked ok in IE6 and now do not work any more  to this issue in my UMPC. But not any more… I went back to use Fire Fox.