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Ahhhhh… memories of the 80s, and the technology thereof:

Toothpicking the cable box – The first cable boxes had a row of 12-15 buttons on them, and a slider switch to choose the channel row, like this:

If you put the slider on the right channel and carefully inserted a toothpick into the top of the button, you could (sort of) get the scrambled channels, which, for teenage boys, usually meant The Playboy Channel. Cable companies were always warning against “toothpick damage” in their monthly bills, on the informational channels, and on stickers put on the boxes themselves… thus basically telling you how to do it. My family moved in 1984, and our new cable company’s boxes just had a giant dial on them that went from 2-99. You could fold an index card in half and stick it under the dial and accomplish the same thing as the toothpick trick.

Cable Guides – Speaking of cable, you used to get these little TV Guide-like magazines with each cable bill that gave you the listings of every movie in the upcoming month. You still see these in hotels sometimes, especially in Myrtle Beach for some reason, but they stopped sending them out to consumers years ago.

Programming a VCR sucked – Why did this always suck? I mean, from a UI perspective? It seems like VCR manufacturers went out of their way to make it as difficult as possible to set a VCR. Our first VCR (a 150lb. model with a wired remote) was actually as easy as setting a digital alarm clock: there were two toggle switches (OFF\ON and START\END) and two buttons to select the hour and minute. So you’d flip the START toggle to START and select the start time, flip it to END and choose the end time, then flick the OFF\ON toggle to ON. Easy peasy. But so many people whined about it being “difficult” that VCR makers tried hundreds of tricks to make it easier (anyone remember VCR Plus+?). Unfortunately, this made each model different, thus paradoxically making it more difficult, and in the end it was worse than using Lotus Notes.

Continue reading “80s Tech Memories”

NTBACKUP was the backup application included in Windows NT, Windows 2000, Windows XP and Windows Server 2003. For a backup application, it was reliable, simple and did its job well. But Microsoft ditched it for the all-new Windows Backup and Restore Center in Windows Vista. It’s a welcome change, as NTBACKUP was looking quite dated, especially compared to image-based products like TrueImage and Ghost.

NTBACKUP isn’t included in Vista or 7, but there may come a time when you might need to restore a file from a BKF backup. After all, there are tons of Windows Server 2003 boxes still chugging along out there, even though IT staff might have updated their desktops to Vista or 7 ages ago. So what do you do when you need NTBACKUP in Vista or 7?

You just go to any physical or virtual XP install and copy the following files from the SYSTEM32 folder to a USB drive or network share:

ntbackup.exe
ntmsapi.dll
vssapi.dll

Keeping the files in the same folder, you can now run NTBACKUP on your Vista or 7 machine. When you start the app, you will probably get the following error message:

This error is expected. Removable Storage Manager is disabled in Windows Vista and Windows Server 2008, and doesn’t exist at all in Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2. So just click OK and continue. You can then locate the BKF file using the browse feature and restore the file(s) as necessary.

You probably won’t want to use this to actually back up a Server 2008 or Windows 7 installation, but it’s nice to know that you can still restore files from backups if needed.

Microsoft’s Security Essentials product is an excellent antivirus tool. But it does have its quirks. For instance, you can only set it to scan your system daily or weekly, with no other choice in-between. But one of the biggest problems with the client is that it only updates its virus signatures every 24 hours. While that’s not a problem for most, it can be annoying for laptop users who aren’t connected to the Internet full-time, or to people that regularly visit “less than secure” types of websites (wink-wink!).

You can easily change the frequency at which MSE checks for updates. Just cut and paste the following into your favorite text editor:

"c:\Program Files\Microsoft Security Client\Antimalware\MpCmdRun.exe" -SignatureUpdate

Save the file as something like MSEUPDATE.CMD, then add it to your system as a Scheduled Task that runs minimized every x hours. MSE will then update according to your schedule.

There is a Registry hack that will allow you to do this too, but the problem with it is that any time MS updates the client, there’s a chance this setting could be overridden by the update. “My” hack is external, and therefore won’t be affected by any client updates.