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 Internets are a buzz with the new Raon Everun UMPCesque device. (Did I just coin a phrase or what). This little gem is the follow up to the Raon Digital Vega. The Digital Vega was a bit underpowered but still sexier than the Chevy Analog Vega.

Digital Vega

Analog Vega

I think the Raon Everun is certainly sexier than the Chevy Neverun, er… Nova (If you’ve ever done a Harvard Case study in college you’ll get that. For the rest of you, keep up.)

The portrait orientation of the keyboard is interesting and with all the radios on board, some of the Digital Vega’s shortcomings have been addressed. The AMD Geode processor will keep your speeds in the Chevy range for now but it’s better.

I don’t understand including XP Home with the device. What’s the shelf life gonna be with XP home? Also there’s a 6 gig SSD drive option. Can you shoehorn a full install of XP in 6 gigs? Isn’t that like putting 10 gigs of… well you know.. in a 6 gig bag?

The publicity shots are gorgeous. Definitely Corvette good looks. Almost Apple good looks. Something like this is what I expect to see in a PC companion. You can take everything with you. It’s small and light but it doesn’t have the UMPH of a full  laptop. Unlike bigger UMPC’s which can actually replace  your laptop. If it has a VGA out option this could be a phenomenal presentation companion too. I also see usefulness in warehousing and delivery aside from all the normal verticals you think of.

With a price between $600 and $900 US it’s going to go head to head with a number of existing UMPC’s.

The coolest thing is that Raon followed up the initial device. It’s important that manufacturers keep learning. New releases  also tell buyers that the market is thriving. In the first year of UMPC’s Samsung, Tablet Kiosk and now Raon all have multiple devices on the market. Asus, do you have something hiding back there too?

In business I regularly see the full run of folks. The indiscriminate gadget geek who needs the newest whether it fits their needs or not. The reluctant CEO road warrior who just wants everything to work and be light and have long battery life. The poor Fortune 500 traveler stuck with a 7 lb laptop because IT only buys 7lb laptops. The “How do I change my home page?” neophyte.

I’m not seeing the market for Palm’s new Foleo. Here’s the thing. If they had crammed an entire PC into a cell phone and then made it pluggable into a laptop or tablet form factor for a bigger screen and better input, I’d be impressed. Blown away. But a twist on the Nokia tablet doesn’t wow me any more than the anemic Windows CE machines we’ve seen with the same form factor.

I want a full PC. Half measures don’t impress me. I don’t see an enterprise component to this in the way that I expect to see UMPCs used in warehouses and other settings.

This won’t be the product that saves Palm.

Apparently laptops are causing back problems. Go figure.

Hat tip to Glenn Reynolds

On the other hand if you are too mobile, you might sit next to this guy on a plane. But at least you’ll have your UMPC to use in the isolation ward.

I was wondering today where Hugo Ortega was because he was not posting at his blog as usual. And the answer came from Hugo himself.

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As promised, this is part 2 of Vista on a UMPC – The Good, the Bad and the Utilities. Today we look at the Bad.

• I hate the new All Programs menu system on the button formerly known as Start. (What do we call it now?). It’s slow. The design reminds me of another app with a crappy interface (cough…ADP…cough). It’s harder (if that’s possible) to move stuff around and actually get it where you want it on the menu.
• Moving small files is ridiculously slow. I’ve seen it take 10-15 seconds to move a 3k file because it has to load the pretty window, show the progress bar and shut down. Give us an option to control the GUI please. It’s worse than XP now!
• Too many windows are still not formatted for the small screen. (There are ways around this that will be covered in Utilities)
• I get errors that don’t seem to affect anything (com surrogate has disconnected blah blah blah). I get an error. Everything seems to work ok. It’s weird.
• Sidebar behavior is strange when moving from external screen to internal screen. When going from 1280 x 1024 to 800 x 480 the order of my sidebar items moves around. I understand them moving off screen but their location in relation to one another changes.
• Disk thrashing has been well covered but seems to have subsided with registry changes. (More in Utilities)
• Battery Life is an issue for some but doesn’t seem to be for me.
• You still can’t easily see the size of a folder. You can hover over a folder and see its size, but when my dinky 40 gig hard drive is low on space, I don’t want hover over every freaking folder to find the black hole that’s sucked up my bits. It’s also really slow for big folders. The Folder Size utility doesn’t work with Vista. There are alternatives but this should be built in. Oh yeah. Vista is 10 gigs. Do the math for the 30 gig SSD drive and see if the extra speed and battery life are worth it.
• A few vendor specific things are definitely NOT Vista optimized. On the Q1, the menu button/volume combination that controls brightness, only reduces brightness. The Samsung menu can be painfully slow to come up. I still can’t view an external screen while writing on the tablet. All of these I believe to be driver issues that will get fixed. I’m just happy to have drivers.
• I’ve not had good luck with the Origami Experience. It crashes the 3 or 4 times I’ve used it. I’m hoping now that everything has settled down from the install that it will work better. 2 gigs of RAM may help too. The UPS guy arrived while I was typing this.

That’s about it. I’m sure my XP list would have been longer, especially since it was badly in need of a reinstall!

Ok, now that I have good drivers for my Q1 and a couple of weeks under my belt, I’m going to try a short series titled Vista on a UMPC – The Good, the Bad and the Utilities. Today it’s The Good.

• I won’t go back to XP. The experience on a UMPC is that much better for me. It’s snappier, prettier and cleaner all the way around. I’m now scheming for how to get more copies for the other PC’s in my life.
• Most of the incompatibility nightmares you hear about are one off problems. I’ve have very few problems with software. Stuff that wouldn’t work or needed workarounds was well documented by the vendors or the Google. The few things that truly don’t work have alternatives. Do a little research and you’ll be fine.
• Pen Flicks (pen gestures that do stuff) are transforming the way I use the tablet. I’ve remapped a few to my tastes. Up and right is copy (up into the ether), while down and right is paste. I have yet to accidently hit the delete gesture.
• The snipping tool is dramatically faster.
• The learning curve from XP to Vista isn’t nearly as bad as from 3.1 to W95. I only felt like a noob for a day or two.
• Handwriting recognition is better all the way around. Better recognition, better input boxes, better web support. It’s not perfect. I can’t read my own handwriting somedays. I don’t hold the PC to a higher standard than I hold myself.
• Navigating the menu structure is clearer for me. I miss the up one level control but other than that I like the breadcrumb navigation.
• Stuff works. I can’t emphasize this enough. I have a number of USB hard drives. Occasionally, XP would simply refuse to see the drive. Sometimes ever again, even though it worked in other machines. No issues with Vista so far. Same thing with networking support. Menus don’t hang. I use to see weird menu delays in XP that I don’t see in Vista.
• The ability to change the size of icons with a slider has been fabulous for touch. Even if your finger is too big for the slider, tapping the control cycles through the major sizes.

In short, I like it a lot. The extra gig that’s coming should help too. I suspect people’s experience with Vista depends a lot on their expectations. I wasn’t expecting much because I know I have an underpowered machine. I knew drivers were iffy and I done a lot of homework. I’ve been pleasantly surprised.

I do have to be careful though. When I tell people that the Q1 is running Vista just fine I often have to pick them up off the floor.

Caveats: I have a year old Celeron Q1 with a gig of ram. My XP install was at the end of its life and due for a rebuild when I did a fresh install of Vista Biz. I’m using the Q1P drivers but I’ve confirmed that they are the same as the Q1 drivers. I’m using the beta HID drivers for the touchscreen. Superfetch is off and I’m not using ReadyBoost with any regularity. UAC sleeps with the fishes.

I admit it. I caved and ordered 2 gigs of ram for my Q1. Kevin and ctitanic were just so cool with 2 gigs that I had to follow. Apparently if everyone jumped off a cliff, I would too, as long as there was UMPC at the bottom. Pricing is now around $172 (or about 3 tanks of premium for my Lincoln LS, stupid V8) to put a little extra gas in the Q1. For the Paris Hilton set who insist on overpaying for everything, I found the same module at another retailer for $499. Drop me line if you like the higher price. I’ll put a Louis Vuitton sticker on it just for you.

Now I’m looking at hard drive upgrades. What am I thinking?