It's interesting that you got Profile Mechanic to work on Win 7. I took Win 7 off my machine and reinstalled Win XP. Profile Mechanic worked fine under Win XP. Recently I reinstalled Win 7 again (32 bit version), and had the same experience as last time when I tried to use Profile Mechanic. This time I remembered to save the profile that I had created under Win XP, and that worked okay with Win 7. However, that's not a long term solution so I decided to figure out how to use Argyll CMS and see whether it works with the Profile Mechanic calibration puck. It does, and the profile that Argyll generates seems to the eye to be similar to the one generated by Profile Mechanic under Win XP, but perhaps does a little better job on my monitor separating dark tones.
Here are the setup instructions.
1. Install Argyll CMS (from
http://www.argyllcms.com/) by unziping the installation zip file in the c: drive root directory. This will create an Argyll folder. Then install dispcalGUI (from
http://hoech.net/dispcalGUI/). Do NOT run either of these programs. Note that you do NOT have to create a PATH entry for the Argyll files as specified in the Argyll installation instructions.
2. The USB driver installation instructions on the Argyll site did not work for me. Here's what did work: Plug in the calibration puck. Windows 7 will quickly give up on trying to install it. Cancel out the USB installation program, and browse to the Device Manager in the System tab of the Control Panel. There will be an obviously uninstalled entry there, which is the calibration puck. Right-click on it, and select the option to manually install the driver. When the directory browser window opens, browse to the Argyll subfolder labeled libusb1. Then click OK, and the device manager will install the correct driver after a delay. The previously uninstalled entry will now be installed and called "Argyll LibUSB-1.0A devices: MonacoOPTIX (Argyll)".
3. With the calibration puck still plugged in, start the dispcalGUI program. IMPORTANT: If you want dispcalGUI to set things up to automatically load the profile when Windows starts, you must run dispcalGUI as an Administrator. Once dispcalGUI starts, it will ask you to locate the executable files for Argyll. Browse to the bin subfolder in the Argyll folder.
4. Note that the "Instrument/Port" is shown as "i1 Display," rather than MonacoOPTIX, but it works okay. Set the Mode as appropriate (probably LCD for most people). If you want to see a report on the "raw" state of your display, select "Tools | Report on uncalibrated display device."
5. Leave all the other options at their defaults, and click on the "calibrate & profile" button. It will open a command windows, which will display a short menu with various options. If you want to manually calibrate your display using its controls before starting the profiling, this is where you select the option to do that. I didn't and just proceeded to starting the profiling.
6. It took about 10 minutes for the profiling to complete. Then the program asks if you want to install the profile, and if you say yes and you have run dispcalGUI as an Administrator it will install an entry in the Startup folder to automatically load the profile when Windows starts.
7. However, the profile loader in the Startup folder will not be able to actually load the profile until you set its Properties for it to always run as an Administrator. If you don't do that, then you will see a dispcalGUI icon on the Task Bar after Windows starts up, and when you click on it you will be told that the profile couldn't be loaded.
8. The Startup folder profile loader does not have an option to unload the profile. Looking at the actual script that is executed, it is using the Argyll dispwin program, so there is probably a way to use that program to unload the profile. I haven't explored that and the many other features of Argyll yet. Also, I know that Windows 7 has some built-in color management tools that I haven't explored. It is possible that you can set those to automatically load the profile without needing the Startup folder entry.