lol... I had so much problems with getting the board/Quartus/Nios to work with Vista, I just put it aside for months and continued with other parts of my courses. I am an absolute beginner to start with. It was so difficult getting it to work with Vista that I was just put off.
It's now a few months after and I am braving myself to pick up the FPGA board again and to my surprise, it now works with Vista using the same software versions.
I was given a patch to work with Quartus 7.2 from the mysupport/altera. Tried it but it failed. Tried Quartus/Nios 8 still failed. I think it has something to do with Vista not releasing services at the background even though I had uninstalled it. Even though I had given the system new licenses/patch etc it was still recognizing the old drivers. I tried to clean my system to the point my system crashed :mad: !!! Newbie in Vista, newbie in everything :o . I think it works now because I have totally reformatted my Vista machine and all is clear. It was a good thing I didn't throw the board out of the window.
I am now using Quartus 7.2 with the patch on Vista. So far it's working well through the first few tutorials and exercises. I guess Vista doesn't like mistakes in the sequence of installing patches and drivers.
Any word of caution for me? Will there still be future Vista related frustrations?