Hi guys. thanks very much for the info and opinions. Windows 8 certainly seems to have polarised its user base.
My QHY5 now works again. W8 will not load drivers that look a bit dodgy - unlike W7, which asked if you were prepared to take the risk. However, it does more than that - when I installed it, it removed the existing QHY5 driver. It then refused to load the latest QHY5 64 driver that is on the QHY website. After many hours of hair pulling and trying to understand the underlying processes (I am not IT), I found that the following workaround did the job.
http://tivadj-tech.blogspot.com.au/2...nstalling.html
wonder what else it has removed without telling me...
the problem with the w8 approach to keeping us safe is that we amateur astronomers often have to use software that has been written (in someone's shed???) for maybe a few hundred users - it is not always going to be pristine. W8 can make it near impossible to use this sort of sw even though we may be willing to accept the risk. I can understand their reasoning, but it doesn't help us much.
re usability, I just spent 20 minutes trying to find the client for Dave Trewren's focuser. I couldn't remember where I had put it or what it was called, but I knew it was in there somewhere near other ASCOM stuff. Search was no help at all the way I was using it - it could find all the paid-for apps, but not some obscure exe hiding deep in the folder structure. With the w7 search, I would have found it in a second.
Whatever, I am stuck with w8 now and will just have to learn to love it..it's not all bad, but I have not found it to be at all friendly. In my experience, this operating system is so biased away from the conventional PC model that you probably need to use an instruction manual just to get it to work reasonably - or download after-market fixes to restore the underlying functionality. never had to do either before.
regards ray