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…)

I’m on the board of a non-profit that has a significant sum (for us at least) to invest to help fund future operations. Last night we had a meeting with the board and our investment advisors at a very nice restaurant. But the room was a little small and it really tight to both eat and review our investment performance, not to mention take notes.

Out comes the Q1 with OneNote. It was small enough to not interfere with my table neighbors but much more powerful than a Pocket PC. I was connected to the internet via Bluetooth and my phone and could immediately verify investment info being presented and lookup articles that backed up or disagreed with where our advisors thought the market was going. I stuck reminder placeholders in OneNote and today I’ll scan the handouts from the meeting and drop them into their place in OneNote so everything is one spot.

It was really fit in this room, no kidding. Maybe a very small tablet like an LS800 would have fit, but certainly not anything bigger than 8.9″ screen. We were working really hard to keep the appetizers off the handouts and we were failing miserably. A big convertible would have come out with ravioli on it instead of notes.

The point is, a UMPC is great for meetings, you get that. But it’s even better for less conventional meetings like dinner, breakfast or when a colleague stops you in the hallway.

I was a subscribed of PC Magazine years ago and I canceled my subscription after they published an article about the hp 4700 Pocket PC where I could not find anything right from top to bottom. On top of that, from the total weight of that magazine 60% was junk in form of advertisements in all formats that you could think of. I have to admit that they have good articles about PCs but when they have to talk about any other type of devices such as Tablet PCs and now UMPCs, you better skip that page, you wont miss anything and if you read it probably you will end all misinformed. And this is the case of Cisco Cheng, a person that does not own a UMPC and probably have been assigned with the task to write about them. Well, Cisco, if this is the case, you better buy one of them so you can finally get the things right.

Today I found that I was not the only one getting tired of all this bunch of… Kevin C. Tofel, one of the first persons in USA to own a UMPC has published an open letter to PC Magazine showing how this latest article of Cisco’s Cheng is completely wrong. Here is his letter:

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I knew this day would come. The Q1 mushroom has come out of the dark. Ticonderoga over on the Origami Portal forums has posted a small app to allow the mushroom (8 way button) on the Q1 to be used as a mouse without holding down the right hand button. Movement is much smoother and faster than the clunky Samsung method and you can control the speed via the settings. The app resides in the system tray and lets you turn it on or off from the tray. I’ve mapped the U2 button as a right click for some time to compensate for the lack of hover and now I have a proper mouse stick, left click (enter button) and right click (U2). The mushroom still suffers from being a mushroom instead of stick so it’s not as precise as the eraser head on the Q1 organizer keyboard but it’s more than good enough.

You can run two copies of the app and be able to switch between mouse mode and arrow keys mode that way. I did notice that it takes over your arrow keys when using a keyboard so you’ll need to leave it off when you plug up an external keyboard.

So from a Q1 user who no longer has to hear crap from the Asus and EO users about the mushroom, a big public thank you to Ticonderoga.

 Since somebody’s paying attention, what I’d love to see next is a way to remap the 4 programmable buttons with your finger. So if I have custom buttons defined for IE, Windows Media and normal usage, I’d like to be able to select the scenario I want with my finger. Right now, I have to open the Samsung app and pick the scenario. It just takes too long and it’s too small. Any developers want to tackle this one too?

No one has been willing to say this publicly so I will, Kevin Tofel is the Hugh Heffner of UMPC’s. Whenever Kevin gets a new, slim, sexy device he’s the first one pulling it’s top off and taking pictures. Hugo Ortega has a ton of sexy devices but you don’t see him taking their tops off.

Now Kevin’s new Q1P,Samantha, has arrived. It’s a sweet innocent device now, but by the time Kevin is done, Samantha’s pictures will be all over the internet. She will be featured in several low budget films and be a minor celebrity at next year’s CES, if she lasts that long! Finally, when he’s done with her, a new, fresh faced UMPC will take her place, while Samantha gets kicked to the curb.

You can see the pattern already. Sammy, the original Q1, is headed for the dustbin of eBay, already replaced by a younger device. The least you can do Kevin is make sure that Sammy finds a good home with a nice, rich billionaire like Anna Nicole did or perhaps, like Heff, you’ll just have to keep more than one around.

I would, because while my wife might not be happy when I bring home a new UMPC, she’d be really pissed if I brought home a girlfriend!

On that note, Engadget has a story that a UK survey shows 1 in 8 (12.5%) men and 6% of women would trade their significant others for a significant device. Perhaps for these folks, a nice shiny UMPC from their significant other for Valentines Day would help maintain harmony in the relationship.

Yeap, have you ever thought that you can lock or unlock your UMPC with just your presence. Well, that’s basically what the author of BlueAcess has created for UMPC, Tablet PC or Notebook owners. The trick is to use your BT phone to lock and unlock your UMPC. If the UMPC finds your Phone the program unlocks the device. If the UMPC can’t find your phone the program locks the UMPC. Very simple. You can see how it works in this video.

 At CES TabletKiosk introduced a new line of Tablet PCs with the Sahara i412T, i420T, and i440D.  And I think they’re some of the best slates ever, especially the i440D.  This is the one I saw last year at the TabletKiosk Demo Days but couldn’t talk about.

All three models feature a slick-looking white chassie with rounded corners and eight buttons on the front.  They also have a biometric finger print reader and a 12.1″ XGA (1024×768) resolution screen with wide angle viewing.  the i412T and i420T use a touch screen rather than an active digitizer which is rare for tablets, but common for the Sahara line.  The i440D features both the touch screen and the active digitizer.  You switch between them with a switch on the side of the unit.  I asked why they didn’t use an automatic switching mechanism and the answer I got was that this way saved them a lot of money on the cost of the unit, which helps keep the price low.  The two 440 models have a Core Duo processor and all of the support up to 2GB of RAM and a 160 GB hard drive.  They also have WiFi and Bluetooth, but no 3G cellular.

Another interesting feature, and unique to the Saharas as far as I know, is that you can get them with Windows Vista, Windows XP, or Linux pre-installed.  It’s nice to have that choice, although personally I wouldn’t hesitate for a moment before choosing Vista.  And they’ll run Aero Glass very nicely.

I’ve been thinking for a while now that my next tablet would be a slate and as of right now, my choice would be the i440T from TabletKiosk.  It is a gorgeous, very full-featured tablet and the only thing I’d change would be to up the screen resolution to something higher than XGA.  I really hope I can get my hands on one of these sometime soon.

Link to TabletKiosk - Tablet PCs, Ultra-Mobile PCs and Custom Computing Solutions