Logitech Harmony 720Costco has the Logitech Harmony 720 on sale and I picked one up Saturday. Don’t bother looking for it on Logitech’s web site, it apparently does not exist there.

It’s a programmable IR universal remote with a color LCD display and is programmed via a USB cable to your PC. You create an account on Logitech’s web site, download the 7.2.1 version of the software and program the remote.

The downloaded software is not 100% Vista compatible. When you run it, it causes the window system to go from Aero Glass to the Vista Home Basic look and feel. Everything still works but the eye candy is one of the few appeals of Vista.

Easy to fix. The software is written in Java and includes a copy of the 1.5 JRE which is not Vista friendly. Azureus had the same problem.

  1. Download the Java 6 JRE and install. Just the JRE not the whole kit.
  2. Using Explorer go to the Directory “C:Program FilesJavajre1.6.0_01” (Java 6 updates might have a different directory) and copy all the contents.
  3. Now go to the “C:Program FilesLogitechLogitech Harmony Remote Software 7” directory and rename the jre folder to jre-old (just in case).
  4. Create a new folder “jre” and paste the contents from jre1.6.0_01 (step 2) there. The folder should look like this.

Harmony 720 with jre 1.6

That’s it. The software runs fine now and I’ve used it to re-program my Harmony 720 already. Eventually Logitech will update the software (the web site says April 2007) but until then this works.

Now if I could figure out how to do this trick in Ubuntu, then I’d be satisfied.