Initially, we discovered that there were problems installing HSpot on Vista machines. In technical terms, the jre did not install correctly, due to the version of the installer that is being used at the HSC not being compatible with Vista. The issues of installation have now been resolved and HSpot now installs on on Vista machines in the same way that it installs on XP (the same installer works for both). No issues have been detected with Vista apart from some small issues with disk management that will not affect most users. The anticipated highly user-specific functionality problems due to the way that security is enabled in Vista have not materialised.

HSpot 4.2 was the first user release of HSpot that is formally supported on Windows Vista, although formal testing has only been carried out on the 32-bit Java version. Tests show that the Windows installer works and HSpot runs with Windows 7. No issues have been found with HSpot using Windows 7 and none are expected.

Version-specific problems with new Windows releases, if detected, should be notified to the HSC via http://herschel.esac.esa.int/esupport/ in the usual way.