Rob Pegoraro
Monday, June 19, 2006 10:02 AM

Last week, I packed up the Boston Acoustics Recepter Radio HD, the subject of my review in late April, and shipped it back to the company.

I knew it was time for that after HD radio made me sleep late. Twice.

Each time, I'd tuned the Recepter to the "HD2" channel of a local radio station -- but the station had allowed this second, digital-only broadcast to go silent for no apparent reason. The first offender was WTOP; instead of its HD2 feed's usual pleasant classical music, I heard silence. Rather, I heard nothing -- with no music to awake me, I enjoyed an extra hour of blissful shut-eye.

WAMU pulled the same stunt a couple of weeks later, silencing its second channel.

Much as I enjoyed my bonus nap time, this kind of thing does not bode well for HD radio's future. If the radio stations offering HD2 broadcasts (all of whom have shelled out some non-trivial cash to do so) can't be bothered to keep them on their air full-time, why should anybody at home bother risking their cash on this technology?

HD radio does have other selling points, but they hardly compete with the dramatic expansion of listening choices that HD2 broadcasts could bring. Digital FM just doesn't sound that much better than analog. Digital AM does, but it's too hard to find and is still limited to daylight hours.

Meanwhile, the choice in hardware hasn't gotten any better. The Recepter remains the only model you can listen to at home for under $1,000. Startup manufacturer Radiosophy has a $269 tabletop radio in the works; after being repeatedly delayed by various development glitches, it's due to ship in July

Another contender should have been on the market months ago, but has also seen numerous delays: Polk Audio's $599 iSonic, which at the last report wasn't due until August.

Most depressing of all, if you're an HD radio fan: The most recent story I could find about the iSonic didn't even mention its HD radio-ness, instead touting it as an XM-ready receiver.

Somebody, Anybody

At the start of this month, I wrote a column defending Microsoft's right to sell Windows OneCare Live, a $50/year security suite for Windows XP machines that provides anti-virus, firewall and anti-spyware protection, plus maintenance and backup tools.

Quite a few readers took me to task for that piece, decrying what they perceived as the basic injustice of paying Microsoft to fix issues that it let stew in Windows for most of the past decade. (And yet I don't recall any of these people reporting that they had switched to Linux or Mac OS X in response. I'm just sayin' ...)

Many of these disgruntled correspondents seem to have missed the columns I've written before about Microsoft's security mistakes. Like, say, this one. (It's always amusing to be called a Microsoft shill when I've got that in my clip file.)

But I digress. In yesterday's column, I tried to assess OneCare as if it came from any random company, instead of The Evil Empire -- I mean, the nice, hard-working folks in Redmond, Wash.

Having been disappointed by earlier security suites, I confess that I wanted to like this one. But I found too many things that need work.

So there's still room for somebody to upend the market with a simple, effective security program that (here's a concept) Just Works. If it comes from Microsoft, I'll welcome it as much as if it came from anybody else. This is too big of a problem for any one company to be barred from trying to help.

Annoyed by Adobe Reader

As washingtonpost.com's Security Fix blogger Brian Krebs noted last week, Adobe released its eighth update to Adobe Reader since version 7 shipped in December 2004.

I would be delighted if I didn't see another Reader update ever again. With these patches, Adobe has accomplished the rare feat of making a simple software fix an irritating ritual on two different operating systems.

In Windows, applying an Adobe Reader update involves repeatedly hitting the Enter key, waiting for this lump of code to be installed, and restarting the computer. In Mac OS X there's no reboot, but the updater somehow requires that you type in an administrator password (there's no way that any kind of read-only program like this should ever need that level of access to the system).

If you need to download a fresh copy, Adobe insists on making you first download and run a separate download-manager application -- in both OS X and Windows -- instead of just letting you download Reader itself. Adobe also lards up the Windows download with an irrelevant Yahoo browser toolbar and the "starter edition" of its Photoshop Album picture organizer.

What does Adobe think it's trying to do here -- borrow the worst habits of RealNetworks?

Weekend Wrap

In addition to the OneCare Live review, yesterday's tech coverage included these other articles:

* In Web Watch, Frank Ahrens explores the YouTube-fueled popularity of "a coquettish, dancing, yoga-demonstrating 18-year-old with a lilting Tasmanian accent."

* Daniel Greenberg tries out a $150 "upconverting" DVD player that electronically amplifies the picture quality of a DVD to near-high-definition levels.

* And in Help File, I outline some steps to take if another Internet provider says you've been blacklisted for spamming.