1. Speakers are a mature technology
2. I am not an audiophile
3. It takes a lot of money to get audiophile-quality speakers

Speakers
My home theater plans required in-wall speakers. After looking at several makes and models, I decided to go with Dayton Audio 6-1/2″ 2-way in-wall speakers for my front and rear speakers, and was considering a few other options for my center channel and subwoofer. However, my audiophile friend suggested that I use the same speaker in the center as I had in the front and the rear because, “It helps if you can get all your speakers with the same voicing… that way there’s no audible drop offs between speakers.” I don’t really know what that means, but I followed his advice.

Because the speakers are sold in pairs, I ended up getting six of the Dayton Audio in-wall speakers, so I have one extra if I need to replace one or if I want to go to a 6.1 setup instead of my current 5.1 setup.

Subwoofer
The subwoofer I purchased was also from Dayton Audio, a 12″ 150 watt behemoth. When I ordered it online from Parts Express, I didn’t know quite how big it was. The dimensions of the whole subwoofer are about 15″ W x 18″ H x 18″ D. The added size meant we had to adjust our ideas of the placement of the subwoofer. We had planned on sticking it in a corner under a side table, but because of its size we decided to build it into the cabinet.

Speaker Cables
I purchased a 100’ roll of some RCA 14 gauge, heavily shielded speaker wire. It was probably a lot more heavy duty than I needed, which did cause some frustration when running the speaker wire. It was so thick that it was difficult to feed it through holes and turn corners. However, it does run across some other electrical wire, so the extra shielding will probably help avoid some sound distortion from other electrical interference.

I looked into the Monster brand of cables, but after a lot of reading and reviews, I became convinced that the premium price for Monster products doesn’t go to better R&D or better products, just better marketing.

Connecting cables
I found a few online stores to purchase my connecting cables from. I looked at local electronics stores, but the prices for cables were out of control. I ordered my cables from CablesForLess.com and was impressed with the prices and quality of their products. I would highly recommend them to anyone.

Even though great sound is necessary for a great home theater experience, it doesn’t have to represent a great portion of the budget. You can still achieve great sound if you shop around for speakers and a subwoofer that don’t break the bank. Also, all of your cabling needs can quickly add up if you’re not careful, so shop at places like PartsExpress and CablesForLess.com.

However, even once all of the speakers and cables are hooked up, you’ll find many other crucial components are necessary to complete your ultimate inexpensive home theater.

Previous articles:

• Inexpensive Home Theater: Introduction
• Inexpensive Home Theater: Technology Primer
• Inexpensive Home Theater: Planning
• Inexpensive Home Theater: Projectors
• Inexpensive Home Theater: AV Receiver

Next articles:

• Inexpensive Home Theater: Crucial Components

I should offer this disclaimer: I am not an audiophile. The objective of the inexpensive home theater system project is to get the best value for the money. However, in putting together my audio components, I enlisted an audiophile friend who has one of those ears to advise me in all my audio decisions — and for an AV receiver he recommended the Pioneer VSX-815k.

Audioholics’ review of the Pioneer VSX-815k was very positive and extremely thorough. Other places on the net gave similar kudos. The consensus was that this particular model is an incredible value for the money, a solid performer, and easy to setup. The Pioneer fit nicely into my plans so I bought it, and it has not disappointed.

Another great thing I found about the Pioneer VSX-815 is that it is well distributed. You should be able to find it at several local electronics stores or many places online. You can shop around, find a store willing to do some price matching, and really get yourself a bargain.

I used the auto-setup feature of the receiver, which is really cool, to configure my speaker setup. One mistake the receiver noticed was that I had incorrectly plugged in my rear speakers for my 5.1 setup. I had plugged my surround speakers into the rear speakers for the 7.1 configuration, but once I got that figured out, the surround sound sounded great.

One thing that worried me after completing the auto-setup was that my subwoofer wasn’t producing much bass. After a little digging in the manual, I found that I had to change the setup a little bit. Apparently, during the auto setup, the receiver found that my front, rear, and center speakers produced good quality bass, so it was routing most of that sound to those speakers. I manually adjusted the speakers to the SMALL setting which would then route the lower frequency sounds to the subwoofer. I also played with the XOVER setting to get the bass just how I liked it. It worked like a charm.

One of the only negative things about the VSX-815K is the remote isn’t back-lit. Depending on your plans, this may be a deal breaker. Other than the remote, the Pioneer VSX-815K has been a great purchase for my inexpensive home theater system, and produces great sound from my speakers and subwoofer.

Previous articles:

• Inexpensive Home Theater: Introduction
• Inexpensive Home Theater: Technology Primer
• Inexpensive Home Theater: Planning
• Inexpensive Home Theater: Projectors

Next articles:

• Inexpensive Home Theater: Speakers and Subwoofer
• Inexpensive Home Theater: Crucial Components

The projector also represents a large percentage of the overall budget. And, since the objective of the inexpensive home theater is to get a great bang-for-the-buck home theater system, I looked at the price/performance ratio and tried to get the projector that provided the best value.

While creating my home theater plans, I had my eye on one particular projector: the Sanyo PLV-Z4. This was a recommendation from a friend who had recently installed one in his home theater. However, I didn’t have the blinders on — I did plenty of research to make sure it was the right one for my setup.

I researched which display technology (LCD or DLP) would be better for my plans and looked at many makes and models of home theater projectors. Basically, my research narrowed down the choices to two models: the Panasonic PT-AE900U and the Sanyo Z4. The light characteristics of our room and the layout of the system played a role in the decision, but eventually it was the better warranty which pushed the Sanyo PLV-Z4 to the top.

Here is a list of some sites that helped me research home theater projectors:

• http://www.projectorcentral.com - great site for reviews
• http://www.audioholics.com - fantastic reviews, not just for audio equipment
• http://www.projectorpeople.com - check out the projection calculator
• http://www.avsforum.com - good source of detailed information if you can find an appropriate thread

In hindsight, I wouldn’t change a thing. The Z4 throws a great picture, and the warranty gives some much needed peace of mind (especially with young kids running about). Of course, the Z4 has now been replaced with the Z5, and I recently read a review of a 1080p projector for under $3000. Technological progress continues marching on.

Previous articles:

• Inexpensive Home Theater: Introduction
• Inexpensive Home Theater: Technology Primer
• Inexpensive Home Theater: Planning

Next articles:

• Inexpensive Home Theater: AV Receiver
• Inexpensive Home Theater: Speakers and Subwoofer
• Inexpensive Home Theater: Crucial Components

The best time to plan is while you still have an unfinished room to work with. That way, you can plan your finished room already having the home theater plans in mind. Retrofitting a room to work as a home theater is hard work — it’s much easier to plan the home theater, plan the finished room, finish the room according to those plans, and then install the home theater components.

While planning your home theater, it’s crucial to be flexible. The plans for finishing the room may force changes or compromises in your home theater plan. You’ll need to be flexible.

One of the first things you should consider is the dimensions and special characteristics of your room. While planning your inexpensive home theater you should answer the following questions:

• Are there any windows or other light sources to interfere and compete with your projector?
• What are the measurements of your room?
• Where is the screen going to be?
• What size of screen do you want?
• Where are you going to mount the projector?
• What about the seating arrangements?
• Where are your components going to be placed?
• Will you need any infrared distribution?
• Where are your speakers going to be?
• How many speakers, what type of speakers?
• What flavor of surround sound are you going after?
• What about sound leakage?
• Are there any bordering rooms which will be annoyed by the thumping bass of your subwoofer?
• Where are you going to put the subwoofer?
• Where are the nearest light switches or are you planning on automating those?

Write down the answers to all of these questions, and be prepared with several alternate ideas when you are forced to make changes.

My Inexpensive Home Theater

Much of the work in getting my home theater system installed happened right after the room was framed in. Having the plans finished and a general idea of what to do at this stage saved many hours of frustrating work later.

Room Characteristics
The basement plans we decided on planned for an open downstairs family room. The room does not have any windows and the proposed theater area was only about 180 sq. ft.

The west wall is shared with a room that we had set apart for cold storage. Since one of the weaknesses of a front projection system is usually the fan noise from the overhead mounted projector, I thought it would be a good idea to put the projector in the cold storage room and cut a hole in the wall instead of mounting the projector overhead. This was a revolutionary idea, because it totally eliminated the fan noise and also cut the risk of the projector being bumped and possible damaged by a barrage of balls, dolls, and other kid-propelled flying objects.

Speakers were an easy decision. I decided to purchase in-wall speakers because I wanted the room to be multi-functional and because of the kid-friendly factor.

In the south wall, we chose to install a gas fireplace in a recessed area of the foundation. We were initially looking at that space to put in an AV closet to house the components, but decided on the fireplace because the basement gets awfully chilly during our Utah winters.

Adding the fireplace meant my wife needed to add some sconce lighting for décor on that same wall. I decided to use the sconces as part of the theater room and planned for dimmer switches so those could be used as a controlled light source when using the home theater.

The location of the components was the cause of much concern. I didn’t want everything to be out and cluttering up the room, but I didn’t want to put them so far away that it would be a pain to switch DVDs or to access the components. We had two feet of dead space in the storage room along the west wall. We decided to put in a custom-made cabinet to house all of the components. This was actually one of the last pieces of the puzzle to be installed, but we had to plan the framing and wiring around this critical part of our home theater setup.

Running Cables
Once the framing was done, and while I was doing all of the electrical work I decided to run all of my cables. The first to run was the speaker cable. I ran cables to the front center, front left, and front right speakers. It took about 100’ of speaker cable, and I chose high quality, 10 gauge cables.

The speaker cables originated in the unfinished storage room and traveled along the floor joists above what would be the ceiling of the room. Then I dropped them down to the approximate location of the speakers, leaving several feet of spare cable just in case I needed to move them from the anticipated location down the road. The speaker locations had to be between two wall studs, so I found the center of the room and planned a spot for my center channel and then found the front left and front right speaker locations equidistant from the center where I still had room between studs.

I didn’t need to run speaker cable for the rear speakers at this point because those speakers would be in an unfinished storage room. I could run those cables when I installed my speakers and receiver.

One big question remained, “If all of my components are tucked away neatly in a closet, how are my remote controls going to work? Will I have to get up and open the closet to use my remote control?”

Fortunately, I found out the answer to those questions. Gadgets called IR connecting blocks (also called IR Repeater Hubs) address this specific issue. The IR connecting blocks consist of 3 main parts: a receiver, a connecting block, and flashers. The receiver can be mounted on a wall, inside a speaker, or somewhere else inconspicuous. It receives the IR signals from the remote, so you’ll want to place it somewhere you’d naturally point the remote. The connecting block should be mounted near all of the components (in my case, the cabinet), the flashers plug into the connecting block, and then get glued onto the front of the components where the component would receive the IR signal. All you have to do is get the signal from the receiver to the connecting block, which is done with a simple Cat-5 cable.

So to prepare for the IR system, I ran a Cat-5 cable along with my center channel speaker wire cable. Now that the cabling was complete, I could turn my attention to the home theater projector.

Previous articles:

• Inexpensive Home Theater: Introduction
• Inexpensive Home Theater: Technology Primer

Next articles:

• Inexpensive Home Theater: Projectors
• Inexpensive Home Theater: AV Receiver
• Inexpensive Home Theater: Speakers and subs
• Inexpensive Home Theater: Crucial Components

This article provides a primer on the technologies involved in building your own inexpensive home theater.

LCD vs. DLP
The video source of choice for most home theaters is a projector. A projector is mounted behind a wall or on the ceiling and projects the image onto a screen or flat surface. Projectors use one of two main technologies, LCD and DLP. Again I won’t go too deep into arguing which is better, but be aware of the different technologies and the strengths and weaknesses of both. Projection systems in home theaters are becoming much more popular because of the recent price decreases in HD-ready projectors.

Aspect Ratio
The shape of the screen is often referred to as the aspect ratio. Old school TVs were in a 4:3 aspect ratio. Widescreen TVs are usually defined as 16:9 ratio. HDTV comes in a 16:9 ratio. When you buy a DVD they usually come in either full-screen (4:3) or widescreen (16:9) aspect ratios. If you’re putting in a home theater, you want to put in a screen in the 16:9 (widescreen) aspect ratio. Full screen is dead; widescreen is definitely the way to go.

Resolution and Progressive vs Interlaced
You will see 480p, 720p, 1080i, and 1080p when looking video specs. These curious numbers refer to the resolution of the image. These numbers are a type of shorthand measuring the number of vertical lines displayed in that image. The bigger the number, the more vertical lines displayed in the image, or to say in another way, the higher the resolution of the image.

The suffix of p or i represents progressive or interlaced. Without getting too technical, progressive means the lines are each drawn sequentially, but interlaced is the old-school way of transmitting video. Interlaced draws every other line of each frame, rotating odd and even lines. Even though it has been around for a while, it does have its place — even the video geeks can’t firmly decide which is better. But, I have my upscaling DVD player set at 720p and I like it.

Cable Types
Video signals are carried to the video source through cables. There are many different type of cables to carry the video signal including HDMI, component video, RCA, DVI, and S-video. Home theater owners should mainly be concerned with HDMI and component video, since these two provide the highest quality and can carry an HD signal.

Audio cables are also very important. In addition to the regular copper speaker wire, you will need S/PDIF cables to carry the digital audio signals between your AV receiver and components that provide your surround sound. Usually these come in optical (TOSLINK) or coax varieties, either of which is suitable to carry the signal required for surround sound.

Networking and power cables will also be crucial in many home theater setups. Knowing a little about Cat 5 and coax cables will go a long way in deciphering functionality and troubleshooting if things go wrong.

HDTV
A home theater using standard definition TV is a horrible waste. Watching HDTV on a home theater is a wonderful experience — the picture is sharp and clear, and the sound is coming through in 5.1 surround. With standard definition the picture looks extremely fuzzy since the larger sized screen magnifies the imperfections that are usually overlooked on a regular-sized TV. The sound from standard definition TV signal only uses the left and right channels. Once you get HD in a home theater and switch to the same TV program in standard definition, you’ll notice the huge difference in quality and be aware of the huge gap between HD and standard definition.

Surround Sound
Surround sound is pretty easy to figure out. There is usually a number associated with surround sound 5.1 being the most common, but you’ll also see 2.1, 2.0, 5.0, 6.0, 6.1, 7.0, and 7.1. The .1 or .0 denotes with our without a subwoofer, respectively. The whole number represents the number of speakers and the general speaker placement. 5.1 includes a front-center channel, a right front and a right left channel, a surround left and surround right channel, and a subwoofer. The sixth channel adds a center rear channel, while the 7 speaker configuration uses two rear speakers instead of just a rear center, one on the right and one on the left.

Again, this was meant to be a simple primer to get you started on your home theater knowledge, you’ll find you have to know more as you go further, but it should be a solid foundation for you to build on. Even a basic understanding these concepts will help you make better decisions as you plan your ultimate inexpensive home theater system.

Previous article:
Inexpensive Home Theater: Introduction

Next articles:

• Inexpensive Home Theater: Planning
• Inexpensive Home Theater: Projectors
• Inexpensive Home Theater: AV Receiver
• Inexpensive Home Theater: Speakers and Subwoofer
• Inexpensive Home Theater: Crucial Components

Over a year ago I started to build my own home theater. I didn’t have a huge budget to work with; I needed to get the best value for my money. So, I started a do-it-yourself (DIY) project to build a home theater. I would never describe my home theater system as cheap — but it was relatively inexpensive.

Why should you build your own home theater? Here are the top five reasons to build your own inexpensive home theater system as opposed to getting one installed by a home theater professional:

1. Price
I requested a quote from a home theater consultant for several components in my home theater. The bid came back at about five times the cost I ended up paying when doing it myself. The bid also included several components that were much better than I needed, and several which were subpar. A DIY home theater allows you to shop around for the best deals on the components that best fit your needs and can save you thousands of dollars.

2. Knowledge
The home theater world is a labyrinth of connections, formats, acronymns and standards. Building your own home theater system will demystify the technologies, which is a crucial to optimizing your home theater experience because you will understand how each component works and what it does.

3. Maintenance
Building your own home theater will help you troubleshoot it when things go wrong. If done correctly, a home grown home theater will not have more problems than one built by a home theater professional, but complex systems like home theaters will have some maintenance requirements.

4. Satisfaction
Surely, I’m not the only one that enjoys sitting back and admiring my work when a job is completed properly. Your home theater experience will be more rewarding knowing that it is a product of your handiwork.

5. Helping others
Going through the experince of building your own home theater will allow you (for better or for worse) to act as a guide for friends and family who are going through the same process.

As I started to review the process of building my own inexpensive home theater, I realized the quantity of information justified a whole series of posts. Writing a series will allow the level of detail required for a topic as vast as home theater. Future articles in the series are:

• Inexpensive Home Theater: Technology Primer
• Inexpensive Home Theater: Planning
• Inexpensive Home Theater: Projectors
• Inexpensive Home Theater: AV Receiver
• Inexpensive Home Theater: Speakers and Subwoofer
• Inexpensive Home Theater: Crucial Components

Building your own home theater is difficult; you will devote many hours to learning, planning, working, and troubleshooting to get everything just right. However, for each hour invested in building your home theater system, it will provide many hours of entertainment and fun. These hours will be even more enjoyable because you built your home theater with your own hands.

I have been working a project lately which required some investigation into online advertising. Let me tell you a little more about my AdSense experiment and how easy it was to set up on this site.

The project I am working on is an online community site, code named Big Trophy Cat. I think it has great potential, but it’s not something I want to fund out of my own pocket (read: my wife won’t let me fund another side venture). A subscription model doesn’t really make sense, I can’t rely solely on donations from users, and since I’m currently employed as an Oracle Analyst I don’t have the time to chase down advertising myself.

One great thing about AdSense is that once you’re approved, you can put AdSense ads on any number of your sites, but all the earnings are combined into your one account. So, while SMJSolutions.com doesn’t generate enough traffic (yet!) to make any significant money, it was a great test case for putting Adsense in with Big Trophy Cat. I can also take time to figure out what ad formats are successful and design the layout of Big Trophy Cat with that end in mind.

Simple Setup

Setting up Adsense was really easy. I applied for an account using SMJSolutions.com as the main site. I was approved within a few hours (it could take up to two days), and could begin picking and designing the ads to go on my site.

Robust Reporting

Adsense does a great job of letting you know how your ads are doing. The reporting system is flexible and easy to use so you can get relevant data about your site. The one thing I haven’t figured out yet how to do is find out which specific ads are being clicked on.

Another great reporting feature is the custom channel. You can define custom channels to track pages, color schemes, ad formats, placement on pages, or any other type of metric you can imagine. Using channels appropriately provides a great tool for analyzing the advertising performance of your site.

Flexible Formats

Adsense offers a wide variety of shapes and sizes of ads that can easily be integrated into your website. You choose the ad format, customize the color scheme of the ads, and Google gives you the code to paste into your website.

However, AdSense isn’t just delivering contextual text ads, it’s a whole suite of advertising tools. There are currently three different types of advertising you can do with your AdSense account: AdSense for Content, AdSense for Search, and Referrals.

AdSense for Content is the bread and butter of the AdSense program. It is the delivery of relevant ads based on the page content.

AdSense for Search puts a Google search box on your site that users can use to search your site or expand it to the whole web. You get credit for the ads that are delivered as a result of the searches.

Referrals are simply ads for Google products or services. You may have noticed the AdSense referral button toward the top of this page. If someone reads this article and decides to sign up for AdSense though clicking the referral button, I can get credited for referring that customer to Google AdSense.

Real Revenues

One of the major reasons I chose AdSense over other online advertising networks is the trust of doing business with an established, public company like Google. Smaller, independent ad networks may pay better per click, but may also not be around for long and may run off with your money. Or worse, it may suddenly decide to run a punch the monkey campaign on your site.

The issue of trust is a major issue for me because online advertising will be the main source of revenues for project Big Trophy Cat.

I read through some of the AdSense success stories and found several examples of non-huge sites that are making real nice revenue numbers through AdSense. It was nice to see some of those bigger numbers especially considering the pennies that SMJSolutions.com has earned from AdSense so far.

Few Flaws

Because Adsense works so well and is so easy, there are a lot of made for Adsense (MFA) sites that exploit the system. As a result, man “junk” ads are in the Adsense system which point to these MFA sites, most of which you don’t want to be associated with your site. Sites like adsblacklist.com identify MFA culprits and show you how to use your competitive ad filter feature in your Adsense menu to block ads from these sites.

Click fraud is a problem that some have predicted will shake up the whole internet and impact the entire economy.

Flaws do exist in the AdSense world. Issues like click fraud and MFA sites are real concerns. But at the end of it all, Adsense provides a great option for webmasters to generate revenue from their websites.

I took a look at the big four search engines, Google, Yahoo, MSN (Live), and Ask to see how they stacked up. I was surprised with what I found.

On my humble site, I get crawled most often by the MSNbot. Perhaps not surprisingly, I also get more referrals from the MSN Live Search than from any other search engine. Also, I have noticed that when I make changes to the site, Live search is the most responsive of the search engines.

One simple example demonstrates how differently these search engines operate. My most popular post to date was Fantasy Football Team Names, announcing the Fantasy Football Team Name Generator I created. If you’re trying to find a good team name for your fantasy team, you would want to see this link in your search results. So, let’s query fantasy football team names into the big search engines and take a look at where the post from smjsolutions.com comes in.

The Google search didn’t list the post in the top 200 results. I noticed a lot of pages that weren’t even close to relevant. Google didn’t perform well here.

The Yahoo! search wasn’t any better. Again the post we were looking for wasn’t in the top 200 results and there were a lot of what looked like garbage links, stuff that wasn’t going to help us with our fantasy football team names at all.

Searching Ask didn’t list the page we were looking for in the top 128 results (it wouldn’t let me keep going), but it did give some other helpful search terms to try. It didn’t seem like it had as many garbage links as Yahoo! and Google did, but it still didn’t find what we were looking for.

The Live search totally bucks the trend. The page we were looking for actually shows up on the first page of results! Not did we find the page we were looking for, but the other links seem relevant and useful.

Why the huge difference? Is the new Live search that much better than Yahoo! and Google? I just don’t know. I’ll leave that for the SEO gurus of the web to figure out. However, because of these results, I’ve started to use Live search more often and it has become the default engine of my Firefox search toolbar.

My biggest hit so far has been the Fantasy Football Team Name Generator, which was ranked highly in MSN searches. The beginning of the fantasy football season brought lots of additional traffic. Other articles I’ve written get an occasional referral from various search engines, but nothing substantial.

So, I made a few changes to be a little more search engine friendly. For those not in the biz, they call it “Search Engine Optimization” or just SEO for short. Here are two simple SEO changes I made to SMJSolutions.com recently:

1. Changed the title structure
If you look at the top of your browser window, you will see that the title of this post reads, “A Little SEO — SMJ Solutions.” It used to read, “SMJ Solutions >> A Little SEO.” Not a huge difference, but the search engine gets the topic first hopefully increasing the magic score that search engines use to place pages. Also it should make it easier for users who may be browsing with multiple tabs (using Firefox).

Since I use Wordpress, making this change was really easy, even for a programming newbie like me. I simply added these lines of code in my header template, replacing the old title code:

< ?php wp_title(' ');?>
< ?php if(wp_title(' ', false)) { echo ' —'; }?>
< ?php bloginfo('name');?>

2. Submitted a Google sitemap
I installed the Google Sitemap plugin and ran it. It’s a very simple plugin that can generate a list of links for the Googlebot to pay attention to on your site. As a site owner, it’s nice to be able to tell the bot what is important and what is not. Plus, the Google Sitemap plugin will automatically “ping” Google to let them know that the site has changed every time I post a new article.

So far, I have been impressed with the new plugin. I noticed the Googlebot hit the generated sitemap.xml file the next time it came by SMJSolutions.com.

So, will it work? I don’t know yet. I doubt I will be on the Technorati Top 500 any time soon, but we’ll see if these small changes are noticed by the bots and whether any of my pages get more traffic because of the two simple SEO changes.

5. Stupid licensing terms and anti-piracy protections
The new licensing terms for Vista only allow you to reinstall the OS once. I’m not a pirate — I have no problem paying for software I use, but I’d rather not have to purchase it multiple times if the OS itself breaks down. If a reinstall is needed (which unfortunately has been frequently necessary on my Windows machines), I would need to purchase a new copy of Vista. Plus, what happens if I decide to upgrade my CD drive to a DVD burner? What if my hard drive crashes and I need to replace it? Why can’t I reinstall the copy of Vista I already own? Also, some have pointed out potential problems with WGA, an anti-piracy application that will occasionally report back to Microsoft on the status of my copy of Vista, and can disable most functionality of the OS if it is suspected to be a pirated version. No, thanks.

4. Exorbitantly high cost
Pricing for Vista is out and it is expensive — the Ultimate edition comes in at $399. Ouch. Of course the other flavors and versions are less expensive, but with less functionality. Plus, remember this cost is only for the OS; and most users need other software to be productive. Shelling out so much cash for just the operating system requires considering alternatives to additional expensive software.

3. Nefarious malware
Windows has been and will continue to be the main target for malware. Spyware, adware and lots of other garbage can will turn your computer into a spam-messenger or bot awaiting nefarious commands of some remote hacker kid. I doubt a new OS will be totally hardened against it, despite Microsoft’s claims to the contrary.

2. Perpetual security issues
Even with a greater focus on security, critical patches and serious flaws are being found every month. Admittedly, Microsoft has made great strides to make their operating systems more secure, but it’s just not there yet. But, as stated above, Microsoft OSs are the biggest target out there. Exploits found in the OS is one way to get malware onto the system, the other way is user-error — usually by installing infected programs.

Also, all of Vista’s security features are new — which means they can’t be totally secure. Microsoft is rewriting all of the networking program stack, which is sure to be the focus of future critical patches. Only history can measure security. Look at how XP matured — it’s relatively solid now, but it took it to SP2 to get it even close to where it should have been. I doubt Vista will be much different.

1. Better alternatives
Microsoft should be carefully monitoring two competing operating systems: Mac OS X and Ubuntu Linux. Although neither is perfect, Mac OS X and Ubuntu Linux are shaping up to be tough competition for Vista.

OS X is notoriously easy to use and just works. Apple’s stock continues to rise because once people learn OS X, they won’t go back to Windows. The iLife suite provides functionality for all of the fun stuff computers can do and Apple’s hardware is sleek and sexy. My next computer will be from Apple, largely because of OS X and iLife.

Ubuntu continues to get better; it’s a great alternative operating system. Sure it’s another flavor of a million flavors of linux, but I like where it’s heading. First of all, you can’t beat the price — Ubuntu is totally free. And it comes bundled with tons of great open-source software. Once it’s installed, you have a whole bunch of great applications and the ability to easily download and install thousands more. I have been using Ubuntu for quite some time now on an older computer, and it’s great. I certainly won’t be replacing it with Vista.