Vista and Home Automation

Since I upgraded to Vista, my Smarthome Manager software is no longer
compatible and I need to upgrade my automation/X10 PC-based control
unit and software. Smarthome has the INSTEON HouseLinc Desktop kit
which I believe is Vista compatible. Just curious what others are
using and their experience/recommendations. Thanks.

Homeseer 2
<kent@adahighlander.com> wrote in message
news676b41v6alf53spdko09h19ef1m40p94f@4ax.com...
>
> Since I upgraded to Vista, my Smarthome Manager software is no longer
> compatible and I need to upgrade my automation/X10 PC-based control
> unit and software. Smarthome has the INSTEON HouseLinc Desktop kit
> which I believe is Vista compatible. Just curious what others are
> using and their experience/recommendations. Thanks.

On Aug 25, 4:01*pm, k...@adahighlander.com wrote:
> Since I upgraded to Vista, my Smarthome Manager software is no longer
> compatible and I need to upgrade my automation/X10 PC-based control
> unit and software. *Smarthome has the INSTEON HouseLinc Desktop kit
> which I believe is Vista compatible. Just curious what others are
> using and their experience/recommendations. * Thanks.

I use the Insteon house link program to set up my approx 80 or 90
Insteon devices. Its a pretty easy program to use and you can choose
to only send the the changes to your network, so you dont need to
download the whole database to every device every time you do an
update. I say this because when I do do a full "discovery" of all my
devices it takes a few minutes to gather all the data for the 90
devices, reflashing all 90 devices takes even longer so the "apply
only the changes" option is nice. This is not the kind of program you
leave on 24 hours a day, its just for programming your devices and
creating complicated multi-device cross links, scenes, cross status,
etc. But it does what it does efficiently, they do need to add some
reports though, when you have 90 devices it can be complicated to
remember how you intended certain cross links to work, etc.