On 11-01-28 2:58 PM, Robert Blakely wrote:
I'm currently pissed at PEXTAX corp.After a hiatus due to severe injury, I decided to go out with my buddies to (outside) Anza, CA to image the stars. I really don't have the many Benjamins to spend on an astro camera so do this with my K20D and I use the PENTAX Remote Assistant to do this. Fine. Now during the hiatus, I upgraded my computers to Windows 7. Well, it seems that the Remote Assistant will only work up through Vista!!! PENTAX has no plans to upgrade this software and all their cameras after the K20D will not offer fully remote operation!!! So much for the company of compatibility. Welcome to the company of decreasing capability. Now this is a USB connection. There are standards. If the folks that wrote the software had kept this in mind when writing the interface, there would be no compatibility problem. FYI, this feature is useful not just for astrophotography, but also medical imaging, Industrial imaging, surveillance imaging and many other imaging uses where automated remote operation is immensely a useful and necessary. I am considering dumping all my (considerable) Pentax equipment and converting to (probably) Nikon. At least the functionality I need will always be there as I upgrade - not only the camera equipment but also my necessary ancillary equipment. Call me pissed in California. Bob... --------------------------------------------------------------------- I don't mind if you don't like my manners. I don't like them myself. They're pretty bad. I grieve over them on long winter evenings. -- Humphrey Bogart, "The Big Sleep"
Bob, that most definitely sucks. But if I could suggest a couple of less drastic solutions to the problem:
1) pick up an inexpensive netbook running XP or Vista. Cost as little as $200 these days.
2) install one of the many virtual machine emulators (eg VMware, VirtualBox, Xen) on your Win7 PC and install a minimal Vista config, just enough to run RA under it. VirtualBox is free, as are certain versions of VMware and Xen.
http://www.virtualbox.org/ http://www.xen.org/ -bmw -- PDML Pentax-Discuss Mail List [email protected] http://pdml.net/mailman/listinfo/pdml_pdml.net to UNSUBSCRIBE from the PDML, please visit the link directly above and follow the directions.
