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Vista is Dead - part 6 of 1 2 3 4 5 6

by Mike McNamee Published 01/10/2010

What's Working and What's Not? (after a month)

It's now a little over a month since install; some of the shiny newness has worn off and some of the irritating little quirks are starting to show through. The system has remained stable with no blue screen incidents although we have suffered a few freezes with Microsoft Excel, Adobe Illustrator, Photoshop and InDesign. Corel Painter is working OK as far as we can tell. The issues with the dongle drivers for Monaco profiler seem irresolvable which is pretty annoying as the software cost many thousands of pounds (and the X-Rite/Aladin site says the driver is Win 7 compatible). On the plus side, other spectros and analysis tools work OK.

The colour management of Windows 7 does not like the screen drivers of a number of pieces of software used for examining profiles and doing colour analysis. This switches the screen out to Windows 7 Basic and highlights the text with a drop-shadow of black. When the offending application is closed the screen blinks as if it is being changed back but the fuzzy text remains. The situation can only be recovered by rebooting. In a fully colour-managed and calibrated environment this leaves the user fraught with the nagging worry - did the colour management switch back in or not? After returning from sleep mode the system bitches that the monitor gamma settings have been interfered with.

Although the 'jump up' thumbnails at the bottom of the screen are quite useful, there is an annoying habit of dropping into the desktop view when operating another program such as Word, for no apparent reason. You then have to move the mouse to recover the application you were working with.

It is only a small point and one that only affects people who prepare tutorials or articles but when you copy a panel with the fancy transparent top you also grab any rubbish underneath. Although Aero has some twee features, if you disable it you lose text quality so you have to put up with strange screen grabs or go to the trouble of moving panels over totally blank backgrounds.

The CD Burner software has packed up, an issue that has yet to be resolved.

Despite having all the updates CS4 still will not make a pdf via the virtual printer route. Again this is a slightly esoteric requirement but it is the only way to get a pdf made from a collection of magazine spreads. InDesign crashes when you try to use Adobe PDF Printer but the free PDF Creator works just fine - long live freeware!

Watch this space, we will keep you posted on progress!

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1st Published 01/10/2010
last update 09/12/2022 15:00:07

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