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I was running my astro gear on a Vista 32 bit Home Premium. Most of the astro software I had worked fine like the Sky V6, Photoshop, CCDstack.
But hardware was another story.
My SBig STL11 worked fine.
But my new Apogee U16M camera would not work using the supplied software. I found out eventually after about a month that I had to manually register the drivers using the DOS window. This was after some bright spark posted this tip on a Yahoo group.
But trying to register the driver manually I must have clicked something too quickly or something and it crashed my computer which would not reboot despite the disk having a separate section to load a copy of Vista in case this happens (so what was the point of that Microsoft?) and I had to get a new hard disk and have my computer repaired. So buyer beware when it comes to Vista and astro gear. If my experience serves then it would be a big mistake.
The guy at the computer shop said Vista had big compatibility problems and that a lot of people were wanting XP. He said that even Hewlett Packard had come up with a disk to revert Vista computers back to XP as they had had so many requests. So Vista for astro is a big flop for Microsoft and a giant leap backwards. Lucky they are a large company and can afford a few messups eh?
I now use only Windows XP (32bit) and everything loaded and worked fine (well almost - you know how it goes).
Then I was unable to get a FLI filter wheel to work no matter what I did. I managed to get it working in XP with only one tip from FLI tech support.
If you must use it make sure the user account control is turned off and you run everything as administrator and be prepared to perhaps having to manually register the drivers.
Its a bit early I think to run some of these later programs with Astro gear which is a small industry and lacking the resources to get their software/firmware smoothly running with the latest Microsoft monstrosity.
Its not that it is impossible to make things run in Vista its whether or not you want to subject yourself to that much difficulty and trouble. Be prepared to be thwarted and need to consult with tech support a lot and their suggestions not working.
Greg.
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