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…)

OnlyUMPC has published 54 pictures of the R2H “unboxing” ceremony. 54 high quality pictures.

If this is not a world record it should be close to it.

Asus R2H has been one of the most expected UMPCs since it was announced back in May of this year. One of the first to be announced and the last to be released. One interesting point is that the Asus R2H is the cheapest UMPC that you can buy in Europe while here in USA it’s price is about the same than the others currently in the market.

The latest episode of my podcast, The Tablet PC Show, is available here.  Hey, if I can’t plug myself, who can I plug?  Anyway, there’s a lot of UMPC goodness in this episode.  You know, listening to podcasts is a great use for UMPCs…  I’m just sayin’.

Sharp-eyed Ultranaut’s reader, Kevin, has been shopping for an Asus R2H and stumbled upon this very, very interesting tidbit at one of the etailers of the new device:

Important Note: US model will ship with the “Optional - Double Capacity” 6860mAh 48W/hr Polymer Battery
instead of the slightly lighter and shorter lasting 3430mAh 24W/hr that is “Standard” around the world.

If this is true of all US-bound R2Hs, then this is great news. We’re working to get confirmation. Can anyone else confirm if this is a territory-wide deal or just specific to some resellers? Check it out via Proportable.

Rob at GottaBeMobile has published about several extensions needed in FireFox if you want to use it in your UMPC or Tablet PC.

I’m a proud FireFox user and I did not know about all the extensions mentioned by Rob there. And at the same time I think that Rob did not mention one that for me it’s a must have: IETab. This extensions allows to open a page within FireFox using the IE Engine. To me is a very useful tool because there are pages that do not look good in FireFox or just do not work well and using this extension you can open them without having to open Internet Explorer.

That’s the question asked in the most recent poll at Carrypad.

As you can see from the above picture Tabletkiosk was leading the competition at the moment when I was writing these lines. Unfortunately I think that Steve forgot to mention the entity that has promoted UMPC more that all companies mentioned in that poll all together: the blogosphere!

Am I wrong?

When the specialized press was telling that these devices were the next big Microsoft’s Fiasco, Bloggers were the only ones posting about the good things that these devices could bring to anyone willing to test them.

If this baby’s still alive, it is thanks to us!

Vista is almost here and while it sure looks nice we know that, like previous versions of Windows, it’ll be somewhat bloated, insecure and buggy. Mac-heads and Linux-geeks will continue to laugh at every flaw found while pointing out that their favorite operating systems seem immune. But why? Are the Microsofties somehow less competent than the boys in Cupertino or the lonely shut-ins (I’m assuming) that cobble together Linux? Nope, at least I don’t believe so. A big part of the problems we see in Windows has a single cause: backward compatibility.

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For the ultimate in mobile W?BIC! (Why? Because I Can!), here’s something original for your UMPC or TabletPC. A RAID built from USB flash memory sticks. The good news is that it’s built from every day readily available (and cheap) components, and it actually does improve performance over a single drive. The bad news is that it’s just an experiment and doesn’t work in Windows (yet) — it’s Linux only so far.

The Thumb Drive RAID Experiment - Big Bruin