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…)

James Kendrick takes on Vista and mobile devices in his post JK opinion- Vista will never run well on mobile devices.

I disagree with some significant portions of James’ argument. So here goes:

“First and foremost in the area of performance.  I have not seen adequate performance running Vista on anything less than a Core 2 Duo processor. ”

James, every day Vista runs just fine on my original Q1. I’ll put my app usage up against anyone but a developer. Every day I run Outlook, ERP, SQL, Firefox/IE, Excel all at the same time, often with Live Writer and OneNote open too.

I agree that 512k isn’t enough. 1 gig of RAM ran fine for me. 2 gigs in the Q1 is beautiful. I hit 100% on the processor long before I use up the RAM now.

I also agree that the new Intel mobile processors, the A1xx series, can’t keep up. I think they were a response to the threat from VIA and that they sacrifice too much performance for a boost in battery life.

“If you use Sleep and Resume you quickly fall victim to the dreaded Vista la-la land where the device fails to resume properly.  Sometimes the device comes back fine but without a screen which is oh so useful.  Other times it comes back but hangs the entire device up in just a few seconds.  Both of these situations require a hard boot by turning off the power, which not even the OS likes, and then sitting through a boot time even longer than normal.”

I don’t see this issue. I’m sure that I don’t sleep and resume as much you do during the day but I do sleep the machine several times a day, every day. Right now I’m rebooting a lot less than once a week with typical usage at 10-12 hrs per day. I do see hiccups, sometimes the touch screen doesn’t come back. Re-resuming fixes it. Switching from external monitor to the internal LCD takes too long but it almost never fails to come back from resume.

The icing on this flickering cake is when Vista fires up the UAC in the middle and asks for permission to continue.  This fires off additional rounds of screen flickering and disk thrashing enough to give the user concern that the system is going to hang up.  Just for grins I’ve refused the permission request to see what would happen and you get the same flickering and disk thrashing just to get back where you started.  How silly is that?

Why the heck are you still running UAC? Are you simulating an ordinary user? You’re a bright guy. You don’t visit dangerous sites or open suspicious email. I get the occasional disk thrashing but since applying some of the changes that ctitanic and others have mentioned it’s greatly reduced. I see it when I connect and disconnect my monitor but not when I stick to being docked or undocked and it’s not any worse than XP. The playlist function in the Origami Experience is a performance pig with large playlists but its only that app.

So here’s my final take. I remember that before I switched to Vista my XP install had become so unstable that I couldn’t get through a day without several reboots. I remember the frustration of navigating XP with a pen. I’m quite happy with Vista despite the quirks. It could be that I came off of a Dell laptop running a Pentium M at 1.2 ghz so the move down to the Q1 wasn’t as painful as it could have been (with 512k it WAS painful.)

Now James, I know you’ve used Vista on more mobile devices than anyone so how about this? You send me a few, maybe the P1610, the Q1P, the R2H and I’ll try Vista on them. If I don’t like the way Vista runs, I promise to send them back to you.  

Virgin America is my new favorite airline. Even though I’ve never flown on it. Even though they don’t fly out of Orlando (Yet! Sooner or later everyone flies out of Orlando).

Why? Well, as Wired is reporting, they are using Motion Tablet PC’s to manage in flight ordering and entertainment. Kudos for the Tablet PC usage.

Plus, the Wall Street Journal reported that they are using Microsoft’s Dynamics GP for their financial system. (Shameless plug, I have a Dynamics GP dedicated site at (www.DynamicAccounting.net).

It’s like Richard Branson is reading my mind. In case Richard Branson IS reading my mind, hey Richard, turn on the in-flight WiFi, start an Orlando to Vegas route and give me two free first class tickets. My wife will take any extra Motion tablets you have and you can blame it all on James Kendrick.

I’m blogging this in inks in honor of Steve Jobs who did not announce a tablet PC today. Apparently he still has a Newton stuck up you know where! I can put my kids through college betting against a Mac Tablet PC.

No it’s not a misprint. The title is lifted from Alexme’s forum post on the Origami Projects forum. He’d like a Q1 Ultimate, that is, his current Q1P with a few new features. Features that probably should have been there from the beginning. Features that would make it the Ultimate UMPC for him.

I have to agree with Alexme’s feature requests. They are incredibly reasonable and Samsung should have been able to deliver them. I suggest you take a look at Alexme’s post and add your own Q1 must have features.

Fake Steve Jobs has been exposed. Fake James Kendrick has exposed himself. Fake Steve Balmer is still a mystery but not as funny as fake Steve Jobs. Large parts of Pamela Anderson have been fake for years and Kevin Tofel picks this point in time to take on take on fake UMPC’s. He argues the hippie love theory of UMPC’s that anything that wants to be a UMPC can be one. That the definition is not important any more.

I disagree. I’m not arguing for a Champagne like definition of UMPC’s (if it’s not from Champagne, France you must call it sparkling something or other) but I think that some definition is important. Yes there are lots of UMPC like devices out there. An expansive definition includes the iPhone and the Nokia n800. But if someone claimed the Nokia n800 was a “Tablet PC”, the community would scream that it didn’t meet the definition of a Tablet PC. The Tablet PC community has worked hard to establish their definition.

Why is the definition important? Picture this conversation:

“What’s that?”
“It’s a Nokia n800 UMPC”
“Can I do all my normal computing tasks with it?
“No but you can do web browsing and email anywhere.”

Now one more potential UMPC user is misinformed. They see the UMPC as a Windows Mobile style device instead of a full PC and write off the whole category.

As for the iPhone, with a nod to Fake Steve Jobs, no hardcore Apple fan is going to call an iPhone a UMPC. If Apple doesn’t want to join the club leave them out! Real Steve Jobs still has a Newton shoved so far up his butt that we may never see a tablet style PC from Apple. So be it.

There is a part of me that does want to dump the UMPC definition entirely and lump all Windows based UMPC’s in with Tablet PC’s as one big category of portable computers with pens. Across the spectrum you can get touch, outdoor screens, keyboards, big, little and in between screens; big, little and in between prices. The common element is the pen, the tablet bits in windows and the ability to complete your normal work with it.

The big question in my mind is if the UMPC category is as big a flop as the media claims it is, why is everyone trying to claim to be a UMPC? We’ve seen a lot of fakes. How about some reality in the UMPC space?

The original Q1 has taken a lot of hits for having a compact flash slot. It’s considered old tech. But the CF slot holds my GPS CF card just fine and gives me GPS capability without any pieces hanging off. Sticking out maybe, but not hanging off. If this ever becomes available in the US I’ll be able to add HSDPA to my Q1 too.  Bring it on SanDisk!

Laptop Alarm is freeware designed to protect your portable computer. Simply turn it on to lock your UMPC when you walk away. If your machine is then turned off or disconnected from power a shrill alarm goes off. It works on any PC but why would you want anything other than a UMPC anyway?

I could see this being very useful for mobile types who occasionally have to walk away from their machine. Stall surfing notwithstanding, sometimes you don’t want to pack up all your stuff to run to the bathroom.

Vista is not listed as a supported OS but it works fine on my Q1 with Vista Biz.