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…)

Unifirm has announced here that they are planning to make Extended Batteries for Asus R2H UMPC. According to Unifirm, this extended battery will have 10000 mAh and will have the same shape and weight than the original Asus Extended battery of only 6300 mAh.

Many people have heralded the New York Times reader as a fabulous piece of software for demonstrating new Windows presentation options. They’re right. It’s a great app. But what if you don’t want the overhead of .net 3.0 on your UMPC? Maybe you just don’t want the NYT. Another, slightly lower tech, option from our friends in Canada is a daily PDF formatted for easy reading.

The Toronto Star now has a free, lighter PDF version available daily. They send you an email with top stories of the day and you can select to download various PDF versions from a basic paper of 8 pages to a more bulked up one with 12. If you have PDF Annotator you can even do the crossword and Soduku in ink on your tablet PC or UMPC. This version is designed for commuters so the downloads are fast, it’s easy to read and well, unlike RSS feeds, it feels like a newspaper. You also won’t have to worry about folding it or smacking your neighbor on the train. I hope more news outlets will look at options beyond the web page. You can check it out here.

(Full disclosure: I work for a small subsidiary ultimately owned by the parent of the Toronto Star. In comparison we’re sort of like a pimple on the a.., never mind, you get the picture. I don’t work on the news side and I’m a 1,000 miles from Toronto. Ultimately, they still pay my salary, hence the disclosure.)

Fujitsu is running an online holiday promotion through January 31, 2007. Buy a Lifebook notebook or Stylistic Tablet PC from www.shopfujitsu.com and get a free Creative Zen Nano 512 mb MP3 player. If that’s not enough, they are offering free shipping and no payments for 6 months on orders over $500. So if you’ve been thinking about a new P1610 like James Kendrick or a  Stylistic ST5112 like Kevin Tofel, this may be the time to buy. July will be the time to pay.

What? You don’t need an MP3 player because you have “The Zune”? I’ve got one word for you “re-gifting”. This way everybody wins. Your, Aunt/Uncle/Nephew/Black Sheep Brother, gets an MP3 player and you get a new tablet. What’s not to love?

I have read some complains about how fonts in 800×600 resolution becomes too blur. This happens because of the stretching of the 800×600 resolution to fit in a 800×480 space. But this does not means that you can not mitigate this issue. One thing that I have done that helps me a lot is to tune Cleartype using this page while I have the UMPC at 800×600.

Try this and let me know what do you think.

I found at Origami Project Forum about this Chinese Company looking for partners to sale UMPC cases like this one:

This is another sign of how healthy the UMPC market is becoming .

The good folks at Southwest airlines are giving you another reason to buy an Ultra Mobile PC. Since they can’t squeeze any more leg room from between the seats, they are reducing the angle at which the seat reclines. The Wall Street Journal has the report today, but the story requires a subscription.  If you’re a subscriber, the link is here.

The key quotes:

“It was impossible for a customer to use a laptop behind someone who had reclined fully in a seat that allowed four or 4.5 inches of recline,” said Linda Rutherford, a Southwest spokeswoman.

Now you can use that normal laptop all bent over in the Lurch position since your seat won’t recline as much. This is not what they meant by Origami people!

And then there’s:

“I’ve seen laptops break when seats come back fast,” says Gary Taggart, a frequent flier from the San Francisco area.

I can honestly say that I’ve never seen a UMPC break when the seat comes back too fast. A nice 7 lb laptop IS useful for bashing the guy in front of you over the head with.

(That last comment was a joke. Please don’t hit me with your laptop when I recline.)

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?