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…)

My Q1 is more than a year old now and while it’s still in good shape, it is showing some signs of aging. My power brick died just before our road trip. Fortunately I had a spare (1 for work, 1 for home) and the replacement arrived while I was gone.

I’m a little worried about the door for the VGA slot. It’s held up well but it’s feeling a little flimsy these days. I’ve blogged before about how I broke my Q1 Keyboard and Organizer Pack. I fixed the KB by cannibalizing the windows button. I find I don’t really use it much. I’m holding on to the Organizer Pack to see if it’s still useful. There’s a chunk of plastic missing near the power connection. I have no idea how that happened. Super glue continues to hold together my kick stand. It’s been at least 8 months since the kick stand incident and the super glue continues to hold fine.

Despite it’s aging signs, I haven’t found a compelling replacement. The Q1P comes closest to being what I want but that’s such a small move up it’s not gonna happen. The Q1 Ultra just doesn’t seem to have the horsepower I want and I’m not a thumb keyboard junkie. The Asus R2H or a Tablet Kiosk model would simply a feature set trade and I only bring up the OQO 2 when I want to fight with my wife over money.

So I think I’ll stick with the old reliable Q1.

Apparently Dennis Rice didn’t have as good a road trip with his technology as I did. His power inverter kept over heating for starters.  I’ve found power inverters to be flaky too but I use one every day in my car so that’s the one we took on the trip. I understand it’s flakiness!

Then of course there was little or connectivity. Little or no 3g. Little or no wireless. Lots of the country isn’t there yet and the problem is economics. It’s tougher to built out the infrastructure with fewer customers. That argument works for 3g. It doesn’t work any more for wifi. My hotel experience was different from Dennis’. They had wireless Internet in the rooms but they didn’t tell you that. You had to figure it out for yourself.

Dennis’ experience mirrors past experiences of mine. That’s why I’m a nut about testing everything before I get in the car. I was testing our DVD players, GPS and PS2 in the car the night before we left for about a 1/2 hour. The PS2 in particular was a lifesaver. It gives the illusion of activity versus passive DVD watching. Thank God we don’t own a Wii. Someone would have been unconscious in the back seat trying to play that on the road!

Josh Bancroft points us to Will it Blend where they make a smoothie out of a brand new iPhone. Add Tequila and ice and you can have an iPhone Margarita. You’ll notice that they don’t do this with a UMPC. A UMPC won’t fit in the blender (maybe a Vega?). I think fitting in a blender is a design flaw Steve!

We did a quick road trip to Evansville, Indiana over the 4th of July holiday. 13 hours up and back for my wife’s family reunion. In the process we blew by the Southeast Regional Headquarters of Gottabemobile.com in Atlanta at 80 mph. Sadly, their location is not included in the list of nearby places in Microsoft Streets and Trips 2007. Otherwise we would have stopped by. I bet Dennis has one heck of a gift shop!

But the Q1 did some serious heavy lifting on this trip. It was our GPS (”off route” has now become a standing family joke). It provided driver entertainment (ebooks, podcasts and music via a bluetooth earpiece. It showed off family photos at the reunion.  It let us find a hotel when our plans changed.

For all of it’s issues, Microsoft Streets and Trips worked really well on this trip. The UMPC has a bigger screen than any stand alone GPS unit. Having to hit one button to recalculate the route simply didn’t cause any problems. We didn’t bother recalculating when we stopped for gas which is were all the “off route” comments came from. The RAM mount was flawless as well. One guy at a rest stop asked if it was a Tablet PC. It’s nice see some people have a clue.

Streets and Trips could have bigger buttons, better controls and you’ll want to run it on 1024 x 600 resolution but the one or two times I did something boneheaded, it got us right back on track. This would have been a pain with a laptop or even a big tablet. Now, if only gas prices would get as small as a UMPC.

Sometimes the logon screen of some UMPCs and even Tablet PCs is not calibrated making very difficult to use if you do not have an integrated keyboard. Well from the todoUMPC team comes the solution! Angel Garcia member of todoUMPC team has created a tool that allows users with this problem to calibrate the logon screen in XP and Vista.

GlTabCal stands for Global Tablet Calibration, after the name of TabCal utility included with the OS. GlTabCal is an utility which allows to export the user’s pen calibration to make it applicable to the computer itself, that way fixing the calibration problem sometimes noticed on the Windows logon screen that makes almost impossible to type the password by touching with the pen on the virtual keyboard. If your computer doesn’t present this calibration problem in the logon screen, then you don’t need GlTabCal.
This utility was created after I discovered, researching by myself, the way to apply a global calibration for the computer, when the user haven’t logged on yet. My interest was because I owned an Amtek T700 UMPC which presented this problem. That way of fixing was published for the first time on the www.todoumpc.com users community, where it was published this utility too, in order to make things easier, saving the user from editing the Windows registry by hand, and at the same time allowing to apply the fix for Windows XP TabletPC Edition and for Windows Vista.

The tool can be downloaded here.

I know, I’m late with this. Congratulations to Frank Garcia for being named a Tablet PC MVP. It couldn’t have happened to a more determined guy.

For those of you not paying attention, Frank (ctitanic) managed to dredge up beta HID drivers for the Samsung Q1 allowing all of us Q1 owners a much better experience in Vista. His sheer persistence has opened a number of UMPC and Tablet PC doors. I suspect it’s also earned him a few restraining orders but we won’t talk about that.

So Frank, keep up the good work. We can’t wait to see what you come up with next.