Hey guys, Anthony here. For my first post, I really want to stress that the deadline for Windows XP expired two years ago. As time goes on, issues with XP and POS Ready 2009 will only grow. One concern that some third Party software developers (e.g. Dropbox, Google, LogMeIn) have announced that they will no longer support users running on Windows XP or POS ready 2009.**
Dropbox sent notifications over the past few weeks to customers saying the Dropbox app on Windows XP will no longer be supported as of August 29th, 2016. Dropbox is a popular tool for saving your backups to both a local computer and the cloud.
If you are on an XP system, you will soon no longer be able to save your backups to Dropbox. Even though you can still access Dropbox via a web browser, Internet Explorer 8 and Google Chrome will no longer be supported. This means secured, safe access cannot be guaranteed.
Another vendor, LogMeIn, has announced that its LogMeIn Rescue product (the means by which we provide our remote technical support) and the rest of their product line will end support for Windows XP based machines by May 30th, 2016. While LogmMeIn and Hamachi currently work, there is
no guarantee they will work with XP and POS Ready ’09 users in the near future. Since LogMeIn Rescue support ended earlier this year, we have seen an increase in time it takes to access these systems. If you are not on a gold level plan, this means you will experience an increased cost of support. Plus, we will not be able to guarantee that we can provide remote access support for your older XP based systems.
**Windows Vista Users: there have also been notifications from software developers that they are no longer supporting Windows Vista as well.
My best recommendation for you is to consider your migration path now to Windows 7 or newer. You can find out if your system is compatible with being upgraded to newer versions of Windows by downloading the Microsoft upgrade assistant. Simply select the version of Windows you are looking to upgrade to:
Windows 7
Windows 8/ 8.1
Windows 10: Use the Windows 8/8.1 upgrade assistant to check
If your system is not compatible, you may want to consider purchasing new hardware.
Does this mean that nothing is going to work once these deadlines pass? Maybe not but at some point they
will fail and I don’t want you or your business to be in a situation where you may not be able to get help.
Thanks for reading! Stay tuned for more of Anthony Cares every Thursday!