April 8th, 2014 by Mike Spence
If you have followed any tech news in the last couple months you have seen that Microsoft is no longer supporting Windows XP. We have had questions from our customers about how this affects them and I thought it would make a perfect blog post as we have gone through this before with the end of lifing of Windows 2000 and Windows 98.
There are a couple of potential issues that anyone using Windows XP needs to be aware of:
- As of April 2014, Microsoft has ended support for Windows XP. This, in itself, is really not a big deal as you have probably never actually contacted Microsoft for support before.
- Security updates end. This is the real issue with Microsoft ending support. Because XP will not receive any updates, your PCI security may be compromised. This means that if you do have a breech with your credit card system, you may be held responsible for the consequences of that breech.
- Updates. Currently, SelbySoft will still develop for backwards compatibility. This will change however in the future. At some point, it will become necessary for us to end backwards compatibility however.
- Compatibility and drivers. We know from past experience that device drivers are one of the first things to have issues. Point of sale hardware manufacturers simply don’t usually write backwards compatible drivers.
- OS compatibility will also suffer down the road. For the last couple of years there has been severe trouble trying to get newer operating systems (Windows 7 & 8) to work well with older systems. This will become more difficult with Windows XP and 7/8 in the future.
Need help deciding what the implications are of running on XP past the deadline? Call us!
Posted in Hardware Tagged with: updates, xp