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…)

Stop! Before you do it, check this video by Chris Pirillo where he explains why he went back to XP.

Vista upgrade is in my opinion as dramatic as the upgrade from Windows 3.11 to Windows 95 was.  A very good looking OS but many devices did not have the drivers for it. And I think that even worse because when W95 was released it included a huge amount of drivers. With Vista many things do not work properly if your OEM have not released drivers for Vista yet. But you can expect problems too with your current software.

So here is my advise. If you can’t live without the “new OS in town”, install it in a second partition and keep your “old XP” partition in case you need it. Ah… and before I forget about it… TURN OFF UAC or you wont be able to install anything and have it running properly.