The support for Vista 64 seems to be working quite nicely with this release. I have posted previously about running the old XP64 driver with Vista 64, but in the end I found it to be not all that swift so I ended up reverting back to the 'dual-boot' option and printing from WinXP SP2 (32 bit). Not really an optimal solution.
With this release, I used my installation on Win XP to update the firmware, then dual booted back to Vista 64 and removed all prior HP drivers and software artifacts, then did a fresh install with the updated software. I can now report that as far as I can tell, the native Vista support is robust and fully equivalent to the native WinXP version, although admittedly I have not installed the updated drivers back on my WinXP partition. I do not expect any surprises there, however. Just as an aside, the driver is a full 64-bit driver on Vista 64, however all the applications are installed as x86 (32-bit) apps, which seems to be the norm for software vendors at this point that are supporting 64 bit OS machines.
Regarding the viability of existing profiles, once I installed the new firmware, I just re-calibrated my paper and printed from QImage on Vista 64 using my existing profiles and found that the new prints seem to be pretty much identical, so it doesn't seem to be necessary to re-generate the profiles. I use a Spectroscan and PM5 to generate my profiles rather than the Z's built-in profiling, so I was curious as to whether I would need to spend the extra time required to get good prints. I will very likely go back and re-do the profiles as well, but there doesn't seem to be a compelling reason instigated by the firmware / software update. The necessity to re-profile may also be affected by the type of paper as well, but I only tested using HP Professional Satin.
So at this point, I am pretty happy with what I have seen. I was a bit disappointed to note that a couple of annoying problems still exist, but overall everything seems to work as would be expected. Even the synchronization of paper types between the printer and the driver now seems to work, which for me even under WinXP never seemed to fully work. I would always see a complaint in the driver regarding synchronization of paper types, but could never get rid of that message. Now, even in Vista 64 it seems to work correctly.
One final note: HP provides a website,
www.designjet.com that is basically a less confusing and easier to navigate portal into the support pages for HP's DesignJet printers. You may want to give this a try if you haven't already.
