Lost Drivers from the Days of Windows 7

So I haven’t used my Orion ST120 in a while which means I’ve gone through two OS upgrades from Windows 7 to Windows 10 and recently to Window 11. Which means I don’t have a driver for my archaic James Lacy LazyFocus controller that goes with my very nice first generation Moonlite focuser.

Fortunately, I’m not the first one to run into this problem. User Xilman asked the same question in this post on cloudynights, and he also asked on the the Star Gazers Lounge where he got an answer.

There’s not much to say except a few of the directions need some clarification.

• First, after downloading the rar file, just copy everything into C:\Program Files (x86)\ASCOM\Focusers. This will make your life easier.
• Open a cmd window running as admin.
• Navigate to C:\Program Files (x86)\ASCOM\Focusers
• Run the file register.bat. You should get a success message. If you tried to follow the instructions in register.bat, it won’t work. If you try to follow the instructions in the README.txt, it won’t work.
• Now you can take up with steps 3-11 and edit the registry to add LazyFocus.Focuser.
• Lastly, double-click on LazyFocus.reg.

At this point you’re ready to launch your focusing program, but it has to be 32-bit. There is only a 32-bit driver. In my case, I had to download the 32-bit version of CCDciel at which point it happily loaded the LazyFocus driver. Tomorrow, I got outside to see if it will actually work….