You know how it goes though, everything starts snappy and responsive and then months later you’re wondering exactly what plug-in you installed that made everything seemingly slow down. So you check your overall system health and then disable or uninstall all the plug-ins that might be to blame. But then what? If none of that works, how do you restore your system to its original glory without punting on 1st down (re-installing Windows)?

Luckily Windows 7 Media Center is pretty easy to reset and get back to where you were — sans the bad parts. This won’t take you an hour and the hardest part is setting up your custom guide settings. The best part is your scheduled recordings can be restored easily.

One last thing before we get started. Use at your own risk! This worked for me, but might not for you.

Start by stopping all the Media Center services like
Media Extender Service and Windows Media Center Receiver Service.

Then open task manager and kill all the processes that start with eh.

Now you should be able to move all the content of the hidden folder C:\ProgramData\Microsoft\eHome\ to a safe place. (you’ll need the contents later to restore your scheduled recordings. You can use mcBackup to ensure you have the files you need, but the eHome directory still needs to be empty to reset Media Center.)

Reboot (you might be able to start the services here, didn’t try).

Launch Media Center and re-run live tv setup. After all your tuners are configured, setup your custom channel lineup manually.

After you have the guide the way you like it, dig into the eHome files you moved and sort by date finding the newest mcepg*-* folder. Inside there you’ll find a backup folder and in there a recordings directory. Sorting that folder by date will reveal the newest backup. (If the time stamp got reset you can look at the name which is year,month,day_hour,seconds).

Now open a cmd prompt and run this command replacing the location of your backup file. Or restore your recordings with mcBackup.

“C:\Windows\ehome\loadmxf.exe –i C:\Users\MC\Documents\eHome\mcepg2-3\backup\recordings\20100529_091633”

Finally launch Media Center and go to Settings>TV>Guide>Get Latest Guide Listings
A dialog will let you know they’re downloading and later another when the download is complete. Now go to Scheduled Recordings all your shows should be listed.

This worked perfectly for me and documenting the process took longer than the process itself. Best of all most of my Media Center settings were intact as well as all my plugins I wanted to keep. And my guide loads quickly, an undeleteable Recordings is gone and Media Center doesn’t take forever to launch anymore.

On a personal note, sorry for such long periods between posts. It isn’t that I’ve been really busy as much as that I’ve been preoccupied with personal things that I haven’t shared — like the fact that I’m trying to become debt free which means I don’t have any new gadgets to write about and the fact that I’m four months through six months of physical therapy after having knee surgery.

The day they launch Engadget3D is the day I quit. Honestly there aren’t any Engadget HD editors who like 3D and it shows in our content. If you go through all our 3D related posts, you’d be hard pressed to find one that wasn’t negative. I think the most positive one was at CES when I said it wasn’t nearly as lame as I thought it would be.

As you can see, the perspective on 3D of the other Engadget HD editors and I has changed quite a bit in the past 9 months. And if we can change you can change. We can all change. It really does grow on you, I’m telling you, this 3D thing is going to be big.

The bottom line is that I love me some football in HD, so I can’t ever see myself going without cable year round, and with the hassle involved in canceling and signing back up, the $327 a year ($62 for 7 months minus $110 savings for signing a contract) I’d save just isn’t worth it — not to mention I plan to expense the majority of the cost to offset my blogging income. I suspect for many it just isn’t worth it either. Sure there is lots of content out there available via other legal means, but the bottom line is that when it comes down to it, cable really isn’t that bad of a deal considering all the HD viewing options you get for the price.

Thanks to my friend Craig Eugea I noticed I was quoted in an MSNBC.com article. You know it really never gets old to see your name in print. It has been some time for me as well. In fact the last one of my quotes to be used — because everyone knows I always have something to say — was back in January of ‘08 at the end of the format war. Anyways, I was glad I had a chance to defend plasma’s honor in such a pro-LED LCD TV article and honestly the fact that it was included makes me rethink my opinion of MSNBC in general.

So I finally broke down today and bought a 13-inch MacBook Pro. Ultimately it came down to be being less superficial than I usually am when it comes to computers and swallowing my pride. You see I just hate the idea of buying another laptop with a useless optical drive. So while I’ll almost never use the DVD drive I’m now faced with carrying around, at least I’ll have the following perks. No overheating, no loud fan running all the time, two USB ports, a Firewire 800 port to capture HDV with, an SD slot (which in effect frees up another USB port), about 30% more battery life, another 80GB of disc space, and some much appreciated performance. And for this I gave up about $100, a 20-inch Apple Cinema display, and about 1.5lbs to carry around when I travel. Seems like a good trade, but I miss my Air already; dammit Apple.

Over-the-air and Blu-ray Discs via Netflix.
I get almost all of my content from two places. Over-the-air provides most of our content and my kids are actually very pleased with the cartoons on PBS and hardly miss the Disney Channel — although I do bring up YouTube on occasion so my daughter can watch The Wiggles. We watch the nightly news and network TV shows like Lost and for the most part get to see everything we want. We watch about two or three Blu-ray Discs from Netflix each week, and have not once used the Watch Now feature on the BD300 or purchased a single show on the Apple TV or Xbox 360.

The missing piece.
The one missing piece is some premium TV shows on HBO and SciFi HD that have yet to be released on Blu-ray. I don’t mind waiting an extra 6 months for a series to be released on Blu-ray, but when the show is only released on DVD, it really drives me nuts. Luckily this scenario seems to be going away as more and more TV shows are coming to Blu-ray, but until then, we’ll have to find other ways to watch our shows.

Various sources
Most know my friends Warren and Andy helped me create a process to automatically download and convert shows for Media Center and while I had tons of fun working on the project — and continue to work on a version for movies — I have to admit I stopped using it because I felt guilty about watching the one or two shows I don’t have access to just to save some money. So from now on, I’ll just wait until the shows are released on Blu-ray to watch them.

With about five months to go until the FSU Seminoles open up the college football season against the Miami Hurricanes on ESPN HD, I’ll end up not having cable for 8 months which is about $500. This still seems like a good idea, but at the same time I dread adding the service back and dealing with an installer, etc. So while it makes sense this year, I’m still not 100% sure I’ll do it all again next year. I suppose it depends on what happens with DirecTV and Media Center, because with DirecTV canceling and adding service is super easy. But if the DirecTV Media Center tuner isn’t ready by September, then I’ll have to go back to FiOS. And although FiOS has fantastic quality and selection of HD, their service dispatch system is quite possibly the worst in the industry.

One of the commenters on the Engadget HD Podcast recently asked me to do this so here goes. It’s been over two years since I did a post like this and I have to say I’m amazed at how much of my equipment is the same and at the same time, how much is different.

My equipment list

• Pioneer PDP-6010FD (Kuro)
• Saphire towers and center
• Speakercraft surrounds
• XPS 420 running Vista Media Center
• LG BD300 Blu-ray player
• HDHomeRun
• Xbox 360
• Pioneer Elite VSX-91TX AV receiver
• 32″ Sharp Aquas — Linksys DMA2100
• 19″ Sharp Aquas — Linksys DMA2100
• OrigenAE rc197 Remotes in each room
• Elk M1-Gold alarm
• Global Cache GC-100
• MSI Wind PC running WHS
• Insteon Dimmers (about 14)
• ISY-99 Insteon Controller
• HAI thermostat
• MacBook Air
• Latitude D430
• 20″ cinema Display
• Actiontec MI424-WR FiOS WiFi router

**UPDATE**

Ian was very responsive to my concerns and has pulled the post — but yet the link still works. Never the less,  the original author has added credit to his post on his blog, but in a way that seems half-hearted to me. But perhaps that is because the intent of his comment was lost in the British to American translation.

Eventually stereos got old and my next love was automotive performance. This was far more challenging as I had to learn the ins and out of compression ratios, value overlap, and clearances. But this wasn’t enough either and I eventually became an expert in swapping engines. We’d order used Japanese market (JDM) engines from various importers and install them into our cars. The most popular was the Honda Civic because while the Civic in the US only had 125hp, the JDM engines were over 160hp — this might not sound like much, but it is when you’re talking about a 2500lb car. This actually lead me to start my own business with my good friend Shaun Torrente. We called it Upgrade Performance, but eventually had to do business as NRG (long story). My specialty was wiring because while many could buy (or fabricate) the appropriate mounts, rewiring a modern EFI system isn’t as easy. I’d create custom harnesses that would make it possible to put just about any engine in any car — as long as it was a Honda that is. I’d pride myself on making my custom harnesses look as much like an original as possible. It was challenging at first, but after you’ve done a few, it becomes mandane. A few times I even made custom ECU adapters so that people could use a better computer from a different car. This consisted of a trip to the junk yard to find donor plugs and an old ECU. You’d cut them out and solder all the pins to the correct location for the other car. So for example an Idle Air Control valve might be C4 on a 92 Civic, but on a 97 Integra Type-R it was A5. Sounds easy but there was like 100 pins and not everything had the exact same name.

The way I did this is the same way I’ve attacked every technical challenge in my life, by reading the directions. It seems odd to me that everyone doesn’t have the aptitude to pick up a book and just make things happen. This is actually how I’ve become successful in IT as well. I’ve excelled because no matter what the problem is, I can solve it. In fact I find technical support and formal training boring and in some ways stifling because usually I can figure it out or train myself faster. 

As you can imagine, when  you have as many interests as I do and such a thirst for knowledge, you want to share it. This is how I got involved at Engadget and on the various forums where I try to contribute. But this same helpful nature also has a downside. To some I can come off as a “know-it-all.” The irony is that I just want to help, but through the years I’ve found more gracious ways. I remember when I was kid, I got so sick of being called a know-it-all I actually came up with a come-back — remember those, they were great — in which i would respond “I know a little about just about everything, and I know a lot about a few things, but I’ll never know everything about anything.” Yeah I know, real cool right? But you have to admit it’s better than “I’m rubber you’re glue….”

Anyways, I’m not quite sure why I felt like sharing this today, but if you like it, you may like my other philosphical posts. If not, then you probably didn’t make it to the end anyways.

Now if I was at least half as smart as my friend Jeremy Toemen, when I had my first child a few years ago I would’ve thought about how I’d deal with all my online posossions. We’ve all heard horror stories about loved ones trying to obtain access things as simple as an email account, but imagine how many online accounts you have. Now try to figure out what is going to happen to all of it when you pass on. I know, what a mess. 

What is cool is that Legacy Locker has a pretty comprehsive solution, which unfortuntely it isn’t live just yet, but don’t let that stop you from signing up so you’ll get notified when it is.