For the past month or so, I’ve been assembling pieces for a major re-do of my home entertainment system. I’ve got a new Onkyo TX-SR505 receiver, a new small-form-factor PC, and a big pile of cables. I’m replacing a high-end (in 2000, when it was new) Pioneer Elite receiver that still works but is increasingly frustrating to use. I’m also getting rid of a Pioneer 300-disk CD/DVD changer that has been rendered completely obsolete by digital music and big hard disks.  The video card has an HDMI output, the receiver includes a pair of HDMI inputs with a single output, and our existing HDTV has a single HDMI input.

The 50-inch Sony Grand WEGA is only two years old and should have several years of usable life ahead of it. We have a passable (barely) mismatched set of 5.1 speakers. Those will get an upgrade sometime soon but for now we’ll live with what we’ve got. My goal is to remove the network and have a single storage/payback point for digital media, including ripped tracks, downloaded music, CDs, and DVDs.

It’s always a challenge getting the wiring for this sort of project working just right, especially when you throw things like HDMI into the mix. Oh, and the two years’ worth of dust that has accumulated in the cabinet will be a wonder to behold, I’m sure. I’m sneezing just thinking about it. This will actually be the first time I’ve tried to use a PC as a full-time living room component. I’ll let you know how it goes.

Anyone else done this recently? Any advice?

Over at ZDNet, I’ve written a counterpoint to the widely quoted and amusing but (IMO) inaccurate notion that Windows Vista is the reincarnation of Windows Me. I see Vista going down a different path, the same one trod earlier by Windows 95:

Vista isn’t Me2, it’s Win95 + 12 years

[…]

So does Windows Vista deserve the Me2 label? After a careful look back at my Windows history books, I see Vista heading down a different path. In fact, I’m struck by how similar Vista’s path so far has been to the one that Windows 95 traveled. Let’s review: Windows 95 was launched with tremendous expectations on a tsunami of hype. It was notoriously unstable and finicky, and for the first year or two there weren’t all that many 32–bit programs. A total of four OEM service releases (in 1996 and 1997) added some interesting new features (like FAT32) but didn’t deal with the significant underlying problems of the OS.

It wasn’t until three years after Windows 95’s launch, with Windows 98 (and Windows 98 Second Edition a year after that) that the stability, performance, and interface problems were finally dealt with.

The similarities with Windows Vista are striking:

[…]

The comments have been especially interesting.

One commenter over there wondered if I was really trying to say that Windows Vista sucks just like Windows 95, so everyone should wait for the next version.

No, that’s not what I’m saying at all.

I didn’t say Windows 95 sucked. I said it had problems (can we talk system resources, anyone?). On balance, it was quite usable, and anyone knowledgeable learned how to work around the problems. I think the same is true of Vista today.

In the case of Windows 95, the flawed OS was still better than its predecessor, Windows 3.1, for most people, so they accepted the problems and learned to deal with them. Windows 98 fixed a number of those problems and generally added a level of polish that the original didn’t have.

In the case of Vista, there’s a perfectly good alternative in Windows XP, which is why a lot of people will wait to upgrade. I regularly hear people say, “Hey, Windows XP is doing everything I want it to do, so why should I change?” There are good reasons why some people might choose to upgrade (especially on mobile systems) but there’s little penalty in waiting.

So Vista has some compelling advantages for some people today. For others, perhaps many others, its inconveniences and temporary incompatibilities outweigh the advantages.

Read the whole historical comparison here: Vista isn’t Me2, it’s Win95 + 12 years, and feel free to leave comments here or there.

Update 2-July: Survey is now closed. Thanks, everyone! 

I’m getting ready to close the survey, so here’s your last chance to help me out (and maybe win a free book) by taking a few minutes to answer some questions:

Besides the standard demographic questions, you’ll find five questions that are specific to this site. Those results will help me determine what you want me to write about.

As an incentive, I’ve got five copies of Windows Vista Inside Out or Windows XP Inside Out (retail value $35 or more) to give away to a randomly selected group of respondents. To qualify for that drawing, leave your (real) e-mail address in the box next to Question 19. If you’d prefer to remain anonymous, just leave that box blank.

Thanks for your help.

Ian Easson left this comment on my earlier post about the availability of new ATI video drivers:

I was looking forward to this release, because they finally supported the ATI All-in-Wonder properly, so that you can use the video watching and recording capabilities in Vista. Unfortunately, as soon as I installed 7.6, IE 7 slowed down to a crawl. I mean it took minutes for a menu to pop up! I uninstalled 7.6, and everything is back to normal in IE7. Here’s hoping they will fix things in 7.7.

I had not noticed that the AIW support was baked into this release (I don’t have an AIW, so it wasn’t on my radar). If you’ve got an All-in-Wonder, have you tried this driver? Are you also experiencing this problem? If so, please leave a comment below.

The next wave of services for Windows Live includes an update to Windows Photo Gallery.

Scott Dart has details.

Sounds like a nice application. I can’t tell you any more than that, though, because Microsoft has decided I’m not worthy to be in the beta. Pffffffft.

Less than one month after the last update, AMD subsidiary ATI has just kicked out another update of its graphics drivers for Windows Vista.

Get them here.

(Nvidia, it’s your turn.)

Last week, I asked, “Who wants my (not so) old Tablet PC?“

I was pleasantly surprised by the number of people who took the time to write and make a case for why they would make a good home for this machine. The respondents included:

• An amateur photographer planning a trip to the Czech Republic this fall, who would use the machine to download photos for archiving and preliminary editing. Having just traveled to Italy and done the same, I know how well this particular Tablet PC works for that task.
• An IT manager for an international charity who wants to replace his paper note-taking routine with OneNote and pass his desktop PC along to a colleague using an older PC. (The good news, in this case, is that OneNote works exceptionally well on a desktop PC, lacking only handwriting support.)
• A contract software developer in the Pacific Northwest who worked on the original Tablet SDK and wants to write a new version of the crossword puzzle app but doesn’t currently have a digitizer.

But the winning entrant is a Houston-based therapist who wants to cut down paper in her practice. As a bonus, I know she has excellent hardware and software support in the same household and has already had the opportunity to experiment with the Tablet PC form factor. Best of all, her spouse is planning to write about the experience.

I’ll let Dwight pick up the story from here.

I was thinking about (and leaning against) writing more on the whole FM/”people ready” thing, but then, thankfully, Scott Rosenberg said everything I would have said. Nut graf:

FM refers to the technique as a “conversational marketing campaign”; the approach is really the Web equivalent of a magazine advertorial. Advertorials — including advertorials that involve a publication’s editorial staff — have been around a long time, and while they can be abused, they are hardly cause for deep moral indignation, as long as they are clearly labeled (FM’s is) and not trying to confuse readers.

The fact that no one saw this coming is what’s strangest to me. Anyway, go read Scott’s piece.

Valleywag’s Nick Denton has his knickers in a bunch because some of the AA+++ bloggers who are part of the Federated Media network have conspired to do a Microsoft “people ready” campaign.

Here’s a screen snap of the post in which Nick gets in high dudgeon about all this:

Denton pontificates: “One would have thought that tech opinion-leaders as influential as [fill in the blank] would ration their credibility more carefully.”

Uh yeah. Note to Nick: If you’re going to diss people for their lame ads, you should avoid doing so when you have a picture of Gene Frickin Shalit wearing a pair of TiVo frickin antennae on the same frickin page.

Just sayin’.

Full disclosure: FM is my ad rep, and if they had brought me this dumbass ad campaign I would have told them no. With adjectives.

Updated in the cold light of day: There actually is a serious issue here, which is that ad deals and editorial content should never get mixed up. At all. Back in February, an FM salesperson asked me if I would be interested in talking with a potential advertiser about reviewing their product. My response, in full, was:

I’m not comfortable with the idea that any editorial pitch is related to an advertising pitch or vice-versa. They are welcome to pitch the product to me, and if I find it interesting and worthwhile I’ll cover it. (And based on the brief description it indeed is something I would probably like to cover.) That decision will be completely independent of any advertising decisions they make.

Hope that makes my position clear for FM and for the client.

The company in question never ran an ad on my site. They never contacted me about reviewing the product. That ad salesperson has not contacted me since then. And nobody at FM ever asked me about contributing to the Microsoft “people ready” campaign, which looks like it really does cross the line between advertising and editorial.

And Denton misses the point, in my opinion. He says those A-listers should “ration their credibility more carefully, and reserve it for products and companies for which they felt real enthusiasm,” implying that the problem was they sold out to (ugh) Microsoft and not someone cool like Apple or Facebook (both of which Denton mentions in his post). No, the problem is that they appear to have sold out. Period. This would not have been more acceptable had it been done with a different advertiser.

I have an Acer C314 Tablet PC, with a 2.0GHz Pentium M processor, 1.5GB of RAM, a 100GB hard drive, and Windows Vista Business.

It’s been a thoroughly reliable performer for me (well, after two trips back to the mothership to have the keyboard replaced).

I’ve documented its recent performance here. I’m in no hurry to send it away, but I’m curious: Is there anyone who’s dying for a portable PC like this at a bargain price? If so, let me know. Conditions: You have to know what this computer is all about. You have to be enthusiastic about Tablet technology (because you can do better with newer machines that don’t include Tablet features). You have to understand that it is not, by any stretch of the imagination, an ultralight. (And yet I dragged it all over Europe without complaining. Go figure.)

If you’re interested, drop me a line and let’s talk. (Update: I can’t give it away, but I’ll make a very fair deal for someone who can convince me they’ll give it a good home.) If you’re not interested, hey, I could use this notebook for another year and not be unhappy.

(Curious to see whether the ASCII converter I used to scramble my e-mail address really works. Guess I’ll find out soon enough. Update: Doesn’t work. Link replaced.)

Update: No more e-mails, please. I’ve made a decision. Read the details here.