Following the announcement by Microsoft to cease releasing updates and hot fixes for windows XP, we thought it would be prudent to state our position on future support for older operating systems and continued support for new builds such as Apples OSX 10.9.
With XP now banished to the realms of the “legacy OS”, we expect a large drive in the market amongst hardware vendors and IT companies to start pushing for organisations to upgrade their networks with spangly new Windows 7 or 8 workstations. Its certainly not helpful but the thinking behind the push is “if Microsoft are ending support, so are we” besides, look at all the kit selling potential.
We don’t expect any difficulties supporting XP at this time, however there is a possibility that our hardware suppliers will bite the bullet and no longer produce XP supported drivers within their ranges of next generation equipment. Generic drivers will still work absolutely fine, however if the copier has additional hardware, finishing options for printing may be greatly reduced in functionality.
At the other end of the scale, one of our biggest areas of query is support for new operating systems, Apple OSX being the biggest culprit!
We get many support calls from clients that have upgraded to the lasted version, practically on the day of release, expecting the hardware vendors to have released updated drivers at the same time. This is highly unlikely to happen!
Its always going to be a game of catch up. The OS update is released and then the vendors get to work writing new drivers, typically there will always be a delay from weeks to months or even longer with legacy kit for updated drivers to become available.
The advice for all apple users is focus on what functionality the upgrade will reduce in the short term before looking at the gains, be prepared to wait for everyone else to catch up before rolling out the update and get in touch if your in any doubt at all.
