Thanks JC, we'll definitely try those. She's a bit more relaxed about the whole thing knowing that her new machine that she is still building will have better color management as it is Win7-64 instead of XP.
[Edit: I should probably warn that this post has a rather negative tone -- I apologize, but the mention of Windows 7 color management hit a truly raw nerve with me...]
I wish that were true (and I certainly wish you the best), but my experience has been that Win7's color management is almost stupidly confusing. To me it seems pretty much a given that people who care about color profiles mostly think graphically and work best with pictures. Win7's profile setup runs directly opposite that -- it's the driest list of pure text possible, with labels for things that seem to have been specifically designed to assure that 1) they don't fit any existing terminology, and 2) nobody can be certain what any of them is really supposed to mean.
Given the general idea of how color profiles work, it seems to me that the right way to do things would be to draw a block diagram of the machine, and let the user attach a profile to a device (or perhaps the line connecting one device to another). For example, I'd like to see something like this:
As it is, however, I get this:
I know more than most about both color management
and computers/software, but I can't make heads or tails of
most of that. It seems to have entries to let me modify things that I can't imagine wanting to change, but none to change any of the things I
do want to (like telling it what profile to use for which printer). There are more tabs to that window, but none that seems to really fit at all well with actual color management.
Having WCS is a great idea -- but at least to me, the current implementation seems to fall squarely into the "What were they thinking?" category.