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 john, the loo, the can, bathroom, restroom, watercloset, Porta Potty, bumper dumper. There is no place that Ultranauts won’t go to explore the uses of mobility. So I ask you, is this an appropriate place to use your mobile device?

I was availing myself of the facilities recently and heard the guy in the next stall tapping the keys on his mobile phone. It bothered me. What if I had an emergency and had to borrow his phone? If he dropped it, would he reach in after it? Did he wash his phone when he washed his hands? (The fact that I was losing at Solitaire on my Windows Smartphone in the next stall was irrelevant. We’re all hypocrites with something.)

Talking on the phone in restrooms seems to be discouraged. Not completely taboo, but frowned upon. Who wants to have a conversation when you need to concentrate anyway?But my experience begs the question, are restrooms for devices that attach to us, like a phone or blackberry.? Should this be allowed at all? Is a non-connected PDA ok? Is there a size limitation like: PDA OK, Laptop Not OK, Q1 Not OK, Vega Borderline?

I think that as mobile devices proliferate, this is becoming an important social issue that Oprah or Dr. Phil need to address. Yes, I’m being facetious but after seeing e.coli in spinach and more e.coli at Taco Bell, do we really need our mobile devices to double as bacteria labs?

So now it’s confession time: Do you use a mobile device in the bathroom?

For those of you who like your placeshifting to be done by a PC rather than an external device, Orb 2.0 is now out of beta and available as a free download from Orb.com.

I use both Orb and a Slingbox and they both have positives and negatives. I’ve resisted the beta of Orb 2.0 only because I’ve been drowning in betas lately but once I get a minute, I’ll install the final version and do a review of how well it works on a UMPC.

I can say that Orb works better than Slingbox over GPRS on my phone, but the Sling has been easier for the kids to figure out.

Sorry guys but the only news I have today is about myself

I just released today the final version of Inkoogle. It now includes a lot more search engines!

Inkoogle is a Universal Web Searching tool that supports Ink. It helps Tablet PC and UMPC Owners to search in all Google different types of search engines, including books, froogle, images, maps, video, etc. But that’s not all, you can search also in Wikipedia using the different languages available at this site, you use the Amazon Search Engine and you can use Pricegraber.com Search Engine for the different countries (languages) available on this site. This is why I call it Universal Web Searching Tool.

This tool is a freeware. You don’t pay nothing for it. But it includes my affiliated ID in some of these searches. This does not cost you anything also and it does not interfere in any way with your searches. It just help me to pay my bills so I can continue helping you and others with what I do in this and other sites.
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The post is here.

The Sling Community is having a 12 days of Christmas giveaway and it’s already day 2! Prizes include T-Shirts, Sling Links, Sling Boxes, Sling Mobile licenses and a couple of grand prizes with all of this stuff in it.

The SlingBox is an absolute killer app for a UMPC. My kids get confused and call the Q1 the Slingbox. They don’t care what it’s called, they just know it magically has TV. So check out the Sling Community for details.

Yeah, I’m probably not allowed to use that line. I’ll tell my lawyer to plead parody. I’ve been using ewallet for a couple of years now, so what’s in my UMPC’s ewallet?

• - All my banking including online logins, routing and account numbers,  all my credit card numbers and phone numbers and logins for all websites where I pay bills.
• - All my family’s Social Security numbers (doesn’t it stink when you have to call your spouse just to fill out paperwork! “Hi honey, I know we’ve been married for 15 wonderful years and have two beautiful kids together but what’s your social?”)
• - Every software key for every piece of software I own. If I can ever get the Delorean working again I can go back to 1997 and I’ll still have my Office 97 CD key. Yahoo! (This was an expression of joy, not a product placement for Yahoo! the portal. Hey Terry Semel, call me and we’ll work out a placement deal.)
• - Our SQL Server logins, payroll userid and password, travel info, Fed Ex numbers, and merchant account information for work.

I admit it, I’m a fan of Ilium’s ewallet. 256 bit encryption is so much better than keeping passwords in Outlook. I’m playing with the new, 5.0, version of ewallet which has taken into account the UMPC platform as part of it’s design including screen rotation, screen resizing, wider scroll bars, etc. It’s also got better synchronization with network locations, ftp, and secure USB sticks.

Synchronization has saved my butt in the past when I accidentally deleted the wallet file, I just re-synced with my Smartphone. Now I can sync to a machine at home too. They’ve also added auto website login in conjunction with IE. Maybe now I’ll have a better option than having IE remember passwords. (IE will remember my bank ID but not my library card. Huh?).

I upgraded from version 4.0 and the upgrade went flawlessly. All my data was intact. The auto website login (auto pass) only seems to work when fired from ewallet, not initiated in the browser but I couldn’t find any documentation on it in the help so I can’t be sure. The app works great when rotated, resizes fine on a Q1 and syncing with my Windows Mobile 2003 SE Smartphone went smoothly.

I’d love to see my saved user id’s and passwords get imported from IE or Firefox and then use ewallet to manage the passwords for logins. Buy hey, they need something for version 6.

You can get a 30 day trial or buy version 5.0 at Ilium’s Site.  

Yes, if you are a R2H owner you can “order” your free upgrade to Vista Business already here. Today this news is over all UMPCs and no UMPCs relative pages that I read but I think that it was first published Yesterday at JKonTheRun.com

Q1 Owners and TabletKiosk Owners will have to wait to see what these companies are going to do with their upgrade programs (if they have any).