Windows 10 Install on Observatory PC

After upgrading my laptops and the home PC I didn’t think I would upgrade the observatory PC for a while yet, as I was expecting problems with drivers etc. But last night I decided to just go ahead and upgrade my observatory PC which was running Windows 7 Pro to Windows 10 Pro. My observatory

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Windows and Prolific Serial to USB Adapter

Are you having problems with Windows 8 or Windows 10 and your older (maybe not official) Prolific Serial to USB Adapter on your observatory PC? Well you are not alone, and now after reading this article: https://www.ifamilysoftware.com/news37.html I am a bit worried about upgrading the observatory PC from Windows 7 to the free upgrade of

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FocusMax Downloads

Over the years I have kept a few copies of Focusmax on my computer. So because Focusmax is not free anymore and v3 is no longer supported I decided to put them available for download onto this blog. Focusmax Downloads – a few old v3 files

Moved from Vista to Windows 7 and added Samsung SSD’s

Well that was a short life for Vista on my observatory PC. I only upgraded from Windows XP Pro to Vista Business in January, but I wanted to add an SSD (Solid State Drive) to my observatory PC to speed things up, so now was a good time to install Windows 7 Professional. Why Professional?

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EQ8 EQMOD and EQDIR Cables on Vista

My new EQ8 mount was delivered the other day and I noticed straightaway the handset port has changed since the EQ6 version which was a 9 pin serial RS232 type connection. The new EQ8 handset connector is a standard Ethernet type connection. So this meant I needed a new EQDIR connection cable. Yes I know,

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Upgrading the Observatory PC from Windows XP to Windows Vista

The support for Windows XP is finishing in April 2014. So really it was time to upgrade the observatory PC. I was previously using Windows XP Professional 32bit edition for quite a while in the observatory. I had no real issues with it, and I know a lot of people still use Windows XP on

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Control your Observatory PC from your iPhone

Since I wrote the post on controlling your observatory PC remotely (and I had the letter about this published in Astronomy Now). I have now discovered that you can now control your Windows based observatory PC from your iPhone, iPad or Android device – whether it’s a phone or a tablet device. Why and How

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FocusMax now behaving itself again

After FocusMax not working as it should after I installed ASCOM v6 and the latest FocusMax version, FocusMax v3.4.0 now works perfectly tonight. All I did was remove ASCOM v6 and put v5 on, then tried lots of different FocusMax versions – still no joy. I then decided it could not be ASCOM, so put

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FocusMax not behaving

After the easy upgrade to ASCOM v6 and the install of the latest FocusMax it now turns out that it does not work anymore. The thing is now I don’t have a copy of ASCOM 5.5 anymore and I can’t fine a copy online either. I do have ASCOM v5.0 as that may be worth

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ASCOM Version 6 Upgrade

I thought about it for a while, but finally decided to upgrade from ASCOM v5.5 to ASCOM v6 as I wanted to use the latest version of FocusMax and that only runs on ASCOM v6. The upgrade is painless, go to the ASCOM website and install the v6 software straight over the top of v5,

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