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…)

A recent Wall Street Journal article (free, no reg needed) claims that computers in school, and by that they mean keyboards, are ruining penmanship. Hello! McFly! How do you write these kinds of stories without mentioning a Tablet PC? Does no one at MS read the WSJ and want to respond? Where’s the commercial where a Vista Tablet PC frees a Mac kid to express himself in writing? Would George Washington’s diaries have been as cool in 10 point Arial? Would we care about John Hancock’s signature if he’d simply typed in Times New Roman and attached a digital certificate? Would you see a movie where they steal a TYPED copy of the Declaration of Independence?

Give me ink or give me… oh never mind. I’m too mad to finish it.

In breaking news, Microsoft’s Portable Media Center platform has been declared dead.  The suspect list includes Apple’s Video iPod, the Zune and of course, the UMPC. There have been reports of the death of the Zune and UMPC as well. Both of those reports are unfounded and we believe the death of the UMPC in particular was faked to frame Apple’s iPod for Portable Media Center’s death.

UMPC had motive. Who wouldn’t rather have a full computer compared to a simple video player?

UMPC had means. Audio, Video, WMP, iTunes, Quicktime, Real, MP3, WMV, AAC, Divx, Xvid, any codec you can name will run on a UMPC. 

UMPC had opportunity. With the new Samsung Q1 Ultra being released at a starting price point of $799, it was like stabbing Portable Media Center in the back.

Yes the Portable Media Center is dead. Apple’s video iPod will probably get the blame and do the time but we know who the real killer is.

If you ask me, I do not see any reason why I should put on ebay my Q1 to buy this one. The amount of new things that the Ultra brings does not reach the point that I consider needed to make me jump into a new device.

1-If you check Vista score you will notice that it runs Aero but with a score of 2.0 and our Q1 has a score on that chapter of 1.9
2-It has a keyboard, but it’s not the kind of keyboard where I can type 60 wpm. And I really not a “I-NEED-A-KEYBOARD” kind of guy, when I need to type 60 WPM and use my BT Stowaway Sierra Keyboard. The rest of the time I feel my device lighter thanks to the absence of a keyboard.
3-It has a fast phone connectivity, yeah, but if you have a Cingular account and you are willing to pay a lot of money monthly. And beside that, I switched from Cingular to T-Mobile about 6 month ago when I got tired of the bad service of Cingular in my area. The Q1 will not make me to go back to Cingular. On top of that, if you ask me, what I want to see in these devices is WiMax, in Florida we have only two cities with WiMax but I’m hopping to see it everywhere soon.
4-It has a new processor, yes, but it’s not more powerfull than current Pentium M or Celeron.
5-More Battery Life, probably if you do not run Aero, but so far for 100 dollars I can have the same battery life in my Q1.

If you are a gamer probably you will see some advantage on that keyboard and it’s design in both sides of the Q1.

As you can see… At least in this device I do not see anything “WOW”.

Lots of sites have Samsung’s press release on the Q1 Ultra but it seems that you can get one for as little as $799. Gottabemobile has a full breakdown of all the models so I’ll direct you there.

The primary difference between units is processor (for the lowest model), hard drive size, OS version and built in HSDPA. Not counting what should be an ultra expensive SSD version, you’ll pay about twice the intro price for a business machine with an 80 gig HD, Vista Business, built in HSDPA and an Intel A110 processor vs. and A100.

The mid range unit at $1,199 get you the Intel A110 processor, 60gig hd, Vista Home Premium but not HSDPA.

All of the units have a built in 1 gig of ram. Kudos to Samsung for that! Also kudos for the 4.5 hr battery life. Even if you’re stretching that’s double the original Q1. I’m a little perplexed about XP tablet as the OS on the low end version. I know Vista home doesn’t have the tablet pieces but I wouldn’t be buying XP for any tablet after using the Vista tablet bits.

This is a price point that going to cause some problems for other manufacturers. Yes it’s somewhat artificially low, but Samsung is still going to beat others over the head with it. The Q1 Ultra is a huge leap forward in a year (with a couple more models in between as well!). Nice work Samsung, now my wife is going to want one of these to replace her Averatec!

Ok, I’ve got Vista running on my original Q1. A week after the install everything appears to work. I’ve got Samsung buttons, menus and Bluetooth. My Samsung Blackjack connects to Vista’s mobile center and I can use it as a modem via the USB cable. No Bluetooth modem support but everyone has that problem.

What I couldn’t find was a comprehensive source of info for putting Vista on Q1. Various sites including JK on the Run, Gottabemobile and UltraMobile PC Tips all have parts of the equation. But nobody had the whole thing in an easy to follow blueprint. So here it is, 5 steps to Vista on a Q1.

For the record, I did a clean install, not an upgrade.

1. Have an external keyboard, mouse and DVD drive for the windows install.
2. Install Vista. After the install I had both wired and wireless networking available.
3. Download the Q1P Vista drivers from here. They work fine with the Celeron based Q1. You’ll need WinRAR 3.7 beta or better to unzip them in Vista. Follow the instructions carefully, especially the order. Ignore the part about No HID Drivers. We’ll get there in a minute. You won’t need Frank’s VBScript file either. Follow any reboot instructions (I had very few.) After this you’ll have almost everything for a fully functional Q1, menus, buttons, resolution changer, etc.
4. Get the unofficial HID drivers from here. I had trouble with the install so I don’t have great insight here. Your best bet is to install the original Q1 touchkit and then follow the instructions from Frank. In theory you should be able to do it without installing the touchkit but I don’t feel like ripping my Q1 apart to try it. Print the directions so you can follow them carefully. The HID drivers are absolutely worth it. Once they were installed, Vista recognized my Q1 as a Tablet PC and turned on all the Tablet PC options.
5. Add goodies. MPM (use the mushroom to move the mouse) works fine. The snipping tool is now built in.The UMPC Scroll Bar app works. Vu-Do (remapping the Q1 U keys) does NOT work.

Everything I have that doesn’t work is well documented as a real issue. No GeckoTip in Firefox. No Bluetooth PAN with the Blackjack. No Aero on a UMPC. (ha ha, Aero on a UMPC. That’s rich!).

And with that you can begin enjoying the Vista on the Q1. More Q1 Vista fun to come.

There’s a discussion going on on the web via blogs and forums around 3 reasons to put Vista on a UMPC. I’ve had Vista on my original Q1 for less than a week. I’ve still got driver issues so I’ll be emailing you Frank but in less than a week I’ve got more than 3 reasons!

1. Handwriting recognition is hands down better. Fabulously better on a touch screen and the ability to train it make it still better.
2. Pen Flicks. Surfing or working with the pen is vastly improved with pen flicks.
3. Ready Boost. My Q1 is faster with Vista on it than with XP. With a 2gig USB drive for Ready Boost, it gets even faster. I can’t do that on XP.
4. Breadcrumbs. Vista uses an interactive breadcrumbs style navigation in Explorer. Normally breadcrumbs don’t do much for me (like on a web page) but with these, you can open a drop down on any of the breadcrumb pieces to navigate somewhere else. So if you’re at Mark-Documents-Work-Accounting-AR, you can simply click on documents for a dropdown of other folders in Documents. Very Nice.
5. Icon Resizing. You can dynamically resize icons with a slider. This is great for touch screen navigation.
6. It will reduce your narcissism. Finally we are rid of the My Documents, My Music, My Pictures. The me decade is long dead, now it’s purged from your PC too.
7. It’s prettier. Let’s face it, if ugly was in, Unix would be on your PC, America’s Next Top Model would flop and we’d all be driving a Pontiac Aztek. Ugly is not in, so even if you can’t be pretty in real life, your PC can be.
8. You’ll feel like a god. This is the opposite of # 6. Nothing can happen in your Vista world without your permission. You are the virtual god and what you say goes. Of course, after a few minutes with UAC you’ll be wishing for some virtual minions but nobody said it was easy being a god.
9. Stuff works. I may get a lot of crap for this, but in my home network (all XP), stuff often simply refuses to connect for no good reason. I have simply not had that issue with Vista. Connections at home, printers at work, stuff that was always flaky simply isn’t. And despite doing installs while doing work (usually a nightmare with XP) Vista has been very stable.

So there you have it. 3 reasons x3. Now, to solve the Vista problems I still have!

Media Center MVP Ian Dixon has a video up with the Vista Media Center bits (Vista Home Premium) running on a Q1P. He compares how well the Origami Experience, Media Center and Orb’s Home Theater interface work on a UMPC.

You can get the video at Digital Lifestyle.

Speaking of Orb’s Home Theater interface, I took a look at it today and it’s phenomenal on a UMPC. I’ve preferred my Slingbox to Orb because the interface is better on a touchscreen but now I think that Orb has the advantage. The Interface is very Media Center like with big words and buttons for your fingers.

Also, I’ve put Vista on my Q1 so there will be a bunch of posts on that to follow.