[Ed P]

I do not think a full restore is required. In my case it barfed  almost as soon as I tried to do a restore

[Ed P]

I really do doubt that you will get any media OUT of the USB port.

If you are just plugging a headphone into the rca  or scart port you should not need an amplifier (Hifi)

[Ed P]

Dave, I have been badly bitten by an Acronis incremental backup failing to restore. (It complained of a ‘missing’ root backup, and it ignored intervening full backups in this calculation). I suggest you do a full verify on your most recent incremental backup just to check that it does not barf at you just when you need it!  I have no idea WHY it complained of a missing backup but that could be any one of a number of things.

I found its behaviour very worrying, and resulted in my initiating this thread. Unreliable and backups are not words that mesh together very well.

[Ed P]

Unless you are running your server under Windows I would not bother – assuming of course that your Linux OS is fully patched.

[Ed P]

The problem MAY be a KVM issue – I remember Dave having a lot of issues with his KVM.

[Ed P]

“Each vector is four bytes long and the 8088 can use 256 of them so Intel reserves the first 1K of memory for their use. It is also possible to call an interrupt in software with the INTn instruction where “n” is a number from 0 to 255 and DOS uses this to call BIOS routines.”

Thanks for the article, this little section reminds me of a time (early 80s) I was an IT troubleshooter. I got a call for help from a relatively backward country to look at a software maintenance contract. When I got there I found to my complete surprise that someone had managed to construct a six bay automated truck loading system (authorisation & billing) all built around an old IBM PC. The whole lot was programmed in compiled Borland Pascal and other than the accounting functions all driven in real-time using the interrupt system (both ways) and a  shed-load of PICS. The amazing thing was that it worked darned well!

As a post-script their contract was OK, they had all the software source code and full rights to it — their real problem would be where they could find someone who could take over its maintenance if and when the original programmers(two) went away to earn big bucks.

[Ed P]

“My experience the sound doesn’t work without the picture (Composite)on RCA”

Do not forget to use the EXT switch

[Ed P]

Page 9 of the manual John gave as a link has a diagram that implies that external speakers can be connected to what looks like an RCA coupling. Still as I said, I’m not 100% sure so maybe more eyes could confirm or deny what I thought.

Page 22 of the same manual states the following which leads me to believe that the TV has the quite common pass-through function for the RCA connection:

“Ext Out
Press ” ” or ” ” button to select Ext Out. Use ” ” or
” ” button to set the Ext Out as On or Off.
Note :
For copying from a DVD or VCR device, you should
choose desired source from source menu and turn
“On” to EXT Out from feature menu.
Ext Out should be On

“

[Ed P]

If anyone has any comments on using the RCA for phono please chip in – I don’t see why it will not work but I’d hate to send John down the wrong track.

[Ed P]

Try plugging into the RCA. One of these RCA adapters should do the trick, no need for extra electronics.

I’m 95% certain this will work unless for some obscure reason the rca signal is switched off when the hdmi out is being used.

[Ed P]

Dan, my wife was using Ubuntu in a VM and knew darned well that the M$ scammer was lying.

[Ed P]

Being Mobile-Only does not completely protect you. link.

If you want another morel to my story, never set up family email address of the form freda.bloggs@isp.com That was how the ‘M$’ scumbag from India linked things to my wife. Never use your surname in an email address.

[Ed P]

They had her name from the telephone directory (I still have a 2002 UK ‘People Finder’ phone directory that was a CD freebie with PC Plus mag, and probably the caller was using this or similar). Although people move every seven years on average it still works for a surprisingly large percentage of our friends.

Most telephone cold callers used our name until we installed the system recommended by Dave – unfortunately the wife refuses to go Ex Directory, but I did ex us off the electoral role to stop the Council selling all our details to cold callers.

[Ed P]

Just checking – the purpose of his inquiry wasn”t clear to me as a phone charger would do to power up most usb2 devices.

[Ed P]

From the TV? If so you need to be sure that you can route the TV digital sound output to the USB port, typically these are only set-up to take media IN. If your researches draw a blank then if your TV has an RCA-out port you may get good enough audio using the red and black/white connections (you will need an amplifier I think)

[edit] I looks as though the TV does have an RCA connector, and also has a earphone socket that could feed an amp.(the latter is not normally a good route to go down, but may be possible if all else fails). Audio is not my bag – pity Slippy or Bruce are not on the forum they could deal with these areas much better than me.

[Ed P]

The Duke wrote:

I had fun for agood 45 mins with one of theses bozos about 4 years back, I just acted simple and slow. I was bored and gather my fun would stop them attempting to rip someome else off.

Take care doing that! My wife did the same and thoroughly peed-off the caller by wasting his time., Unfortunately what she did not know (or me) was that Yahoo had been criminally irresponsible in their computer security, and compounded it by not informing anyone for years. As a result the Subcontinent ‘gentleman’ just used her surname to search the Yahoo password dump and made her life (and mine in passing) hell for three months until she dumped her old BT email account and used a brand new email account instead. Luckily I had coached her never to use the same password twice and to distrust on-line banking (before the days of wide-spread two factor), so the collateral financial impact was zero.

[Ed P]

Tbh XP and ‘safe’ are a contradiction in terms. If you need to run XP as safely as possible your best bet would be to get a hold of Win7 Pro and run the Virtual PC version of XP. It will not do games as such, but if you access the downloaded iso using VMWare Player then it might be good enough for some old games if your PC hardware is up to it.

Going on line with XP is a bit like running hacker click-bait, good luck with that!

[Ed P]

Might be worth pursuing ‘Black box‘ insurance in those circumstances.

[Ed P]

The old True Image is OK, but I have found modern versions unreliable and slow especially if you use incremental backup (It goes belly up if early versions in the chain are missing even if there are intervening full backups – carp product from that standpoint). I’m seriously thinking of moving away from True Image to an alternative.

[Ed P]

System Restore is disabled by M$ as the default case. It just needs turning on. Although I agree that it is not 100% reliable thanks to M$ updates, it does give a handy low cost fall back case and saves a full backup restore.

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