Pff, that was not easy! I tried to upgrade from a XP laptop to a Vista laptop. I was already prepared for the worst. After a long 3 day struggle I got the thing going again:
The easiest were Deepskystacker (for dslr astrophotography) and Registax (for planetary astrophotography: these programs worked right away.
Then came PHDguiding (autoguiding). I had to run it in XP sp2 mode with administrator rights.
Then came QCfocus (planetary astrophotography). Had to install a porttalk.sys driver in the windows/system32 directory. And also this was running.
Then came my beloved Philips ToUcam pro webcam. Philips didn't support this nice CCD webcam anymore in Vista. But I got the thing going by 1) flashing the SPC900 binary into the pcvc740k webcam 2) installing the SPC900 Vista drivers on the laptop. Then it worked ok with QCFocus. The picture shows my pcvc740k ToUcam pro acting as a SPC900 in Vista: it works!!
Then came my planetarium program: Cartes du Ciel. It only works correctly by running it with administrator rights.
The most difficult problem was getting the telesope mount going. There is open-source software for that: EQmod, but the official v1.13 release didn't have a nice installer, so the .exe and .dll files were not registered correctly in Vista. After a long struggle and searches for help on various astro fora around the world, I finally found that I needed to register myself in the yahoo tech groups supporting the driver, and download the 1.14f beta version: this worked right away......
Now I can do all I did in XP also in Vista!!!
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