Vista help needed

[gregbradley]

I have a core 2 duo Vista 32bit home premium laptop. I have come all the way to my dark site, setup everything and then my XP desktop's monitor would not work.

So I switched to the laptop.

I was unable to get FLI gear or anything for that matter to work in the Vista 32bit system a year ago. Oh, not true, I did get the Apogee U16M to work but it was a complex workaround using a way to register the unit on the registry which is where I think it bogs down.

I see FLI has a new 32bit Vista installer -great.
It requires all earlier versions to be removed before it works. Guess what?

I am unable to do this. I tried Control Panel uninstall programs, I have manually deleted the FLI dll file in Ascom in various sub directories and still no go. It must be in the registry somewhere.
FLI's uninstall program from the earlier version did not work at all.

Any suggestions?

I also could not get my ST402ME to connect with the Vista laptop either.

Its clear tonight and last night had some amazing seeing. Mercifully it came over cloudy anyway so I only missed out on a couple of hours of perfect seeing. Tonight it could easily be perfect seeing all night!


Greg

[rally]

Greg,

I eventually got everything working on my Vista machine.

Some first thoughts
Is UAC turned off, are you logged on as an Administrator (I found those things essential)

As I recall some programs really cared about whether they were being installed into a standard, 32 bit or 64 bit Program Files directory.

Do you have time to resinstall everything ? - start with clean slate.
I know that can take ages and you will need all the drivers and tools and settings - probabaly more than you can do in a day - and probably impossible to b successful without internet access to the latest drivers and updates.
But sometimes that is the easiest solution.

I (try to) ensure that I have a backup copy of every driver, plug in, installer and program on my system and a USB drive - just in case.

Another option - try reinstalling the same old versions of your FLI programs etc and then try removing them again straight away.

Update all revisions to current.

Beg, Buy or Borrow a new monitor for your main system.

Good luck with it.

Rally

[torana68]

my 2c worth get rid of it and go back to XP or go windows 7, anyone i know who has Vista has dramas....
Roger

[gregbradley]

Yes I realise Vista is a troubled platform but I think it can be made to work. Just not easily.

I was hoping to get it going tonight so I could image.

Greg.

[renormalised]

A complete reinstall is the long way of going about fixing the problem, but it may work (emphasis on may). Usually, problems like this are caused by old values and keys being left in the registry. They then interfere with everything else you try to do. However, unless you know exactly what you're doing you can cause even more problems by going into the registry and removing them manually. It can be done...I've done it myself...but you have to be careful. If you don't know what you're doing or what affects what, removing what may seem a superfluous key could cause your system to crash completely.

You could try a registry cleaning program like RegClean or another one like it. They'll go through and clean out all the dead keys and entries in your system. But sometimes there might still be some left it can't clean out and that's where you have to go in manually and do the job. However, be careful and make sure you know what affects what.

[gregbradley]

Thanks for the tips.

I reloaded the older FLI software and luckily the uninstall program now worked.

The 32 bit FLI driver installer kit then worked. I can now get the Proline to work - yah!

I updated the drivers for the SBIG ST402 and sure enough they had a fix for the camera not connecting. So now that works as well -double yah!

But alas the FLI filter wheel won't connect. This is funny as it was the only thing I managed to get to work in the past with Vista.
It works on my XP lappie which is an antiuqatedd USB1 machine so downloads will be really slow. Worst case I should be able to image using that lappie and the updated ST402 drivers (it wouldn't connect on that computer either).

I do have wireless 3G internet at my remote observatory so downloading drivers etc is available - thank god for 3G wireless.

Any suggestions on the filter wheel?

When I open up that program the whole screen goes into really large icons. Once I close the program the screen goes back to normal sized icons.

Greg

[renormalised]

Sounds like there some stuff up or conflict with the display drivers. Try uninstalling and then reloading the drivers for the FW. Make sure you uninstall all the FW software though, even icons that are left onscreen. Then reload the software and reboot the computer.

[gregbradley]

Good tip, thank you Carl.

In the end I managed to be able to run everything even though the filter wheel was only able to be controlled through FLI filter wheel software and not automatically in CCDSoft. Only to find I could not get the autoguiding to work properly. Wow, what a weekend! I spent a few hours trying to debug the autoguiding. Dec errors would just climb and climb.

Amazing when you switch computers how everything is thrown into
not working and having to be debugged as if from scratch.

Perhaps the powered hub I started using was causing some cable drag otherwise the setup was exactly the same (except for a different computer running everything) as I have used hundreds of hours before.

It makes you realise why using remote internet imaging sites needs to be a separate category for imaging contests. Wow, getting all this complex gear to work beautifully everytime is not for the faint hearted!

Greg.

[renormalised]

You'll find, as with anything like that, the equipment is mostly tried and true and the OSes are the same. Like anything else, if you want something to run reliably, you don't go for "state of the art" stuff. If you do, you make sure it's reliable and actually works well with some of the older stuff.

Why do you think NASA knocked back Microsoft's offer to run the computers on their probes with a version of Windows. Reliability. Can you imagine Win having a BSOD right in the middle of a mission on a probe, when it needed it's computers running at 100%. That would be more than likely to happen considering it's track record on Earth, it'd be even more likely in space where the env' is much harsher.

[gregbradley]

Yes so true. XP seems to remain to be the OS of choice for astrogear. Win 7 may be OK. Haven't heard a lot of feedback yet. Win 7 is good for CCDstack with a computer with multiple cores as it runs faster using all the cores on time consuming tasks like deconvolution.

But XP is reliable.

Greg.