This first post is about the problems following upgrading my computer and installing Windows 7/64 bit. This would probably apply also to Win 8 and 10. A lot of my equipment is old, and manufacturers these days have no interest in supporting old models. They’d much prefer to sell you new kit. The drivers for my printer, scanner etc. were all 32-bit and wouldn’t install in the 64 bit version of Windows 7. For my Epson 1290 printer I found that there was a Microsoft driver which worked, except that the colours were not the same and I had to remake all my printer profiles.
There are no drivers available for the Minolta Scan Dual 3. As it’s not used much now, for a time I used a laptop for scanning, which still had Windows7/32 bit installed. The original driver worked with this OK. What I’ve now done is to install VirtualBox, a virtual machine manager, set up a virtual machine with an old copy of Windows XP installed into it, and use this for scanning. Very convoluted, but it works.
The flatbed scanner, I just bought a new one, a LiDe120. There were work-arounds, I could have installed my old scanner in the XP virtual machine as well, but it’s very convenient to use the scanner as a photocopier, using the buttons on the scanner. The LiDe120 didn’t cost much.
The final item to give problems was the Colorvision Spyder 2 display calibrator. For this I found some open source software, DisplayCAL and Argyll (they work together) which will do display profiling with Spyder colorimeters (except for the original version). This software has a huge number of options, most of which I don’t understand, so I left them at the defaults, and it takes over 2 hours to make the profile compared with about 10 min for the ColorVision software, but it works. In fact the profiles are probably better. When looking at the calibration curves which are loaded into the graphics card, they are much smoother, and the red, green and blue curves are closer together, which one would expect with a half-decent monitor.
After all this I decided not to upgrade to Windows 10 as it may just bring a whole new load of compatibility problems.