Several years ago, we upgraded one of our oldest systems, which was still running Windows XP Professional, to Windows 10. Its hardware had been upgraded piece by piece over the years, but we’d kept Windows XP on it. We heard the hard drive start clicking so we knew it was time to put in a new drive. We decided to install an SSD, add more memory and put Windows 10 on that PC. After all, Windows XP was no longer supported by Microsoft and wasn’t receiving new security updates, so why not? We’d moved all our other office PCs from XP to Windows 7 over the past several years, this was the only one left. We have even put Windows 10 on a couple of workstations and it’s been well liked by those using it; a worthy successor to Windows 7 and far superior to Windows 8 in our opinion.
So we put in the new SSD, added the RAM, installed Windows 10 and everything was good – that is, until we started installing a couple of devices that we used that PC with. After much research and contacting the device manufacturers, which were luckily still in business, we discovered that there was no way to get these devices working in Windows 10, or for that matter Windows 7 or Windows 8.
One of the devices wasn’t really a problem. We could get a newer model from the manufacturer that worked with Windows 10 at a relatively low cost. The other device was a different story. Replacing it would cost around $1,450, which was enough to make us rethink the Windows 10 upgrade. This PC doesn’t have to be connected to the internet, so security updates weren’t as much of a concern. The device works like new, we haven’t had any problems out of it over the 10+ years that we’ve had it. Why replace it?
We hear this from customers all the time. Their legacy hardware or software isn’t supported by newer operating systems, and upgrading to a supported version is either cost-prohibitive or impossible because the company that made the hardware or software is no longer in business.