Originally Posted by
bdesmond
I'm missing why you can't just leave these devices on Windows 98. It may not be ideal, but it sounds like their LOB devices and they shouldn't be messed with. I've worked in lots of situations whereby the machinery that ran the business worked on some old OS (DOS, Windows 95, 98, etc) and that was that. If you break the widget machine the copany stops making money adn the IT department has no job, so why not just figure out how to support the widget machine as-is until the company needs a new widget machine?
XP is MUCH more stable on the device than 98. 98 would simply blow up at random and quit printing labels, etc. The vendor wants to sell us new hardware which absolutely isn't necessary. Mind you, it works decently well. It's simply that WinFLP works MUCH better. It completely solves the minor-yet-persistent issues we've been having. So, this is more frustration that I can't perfect things only due to MS licensing BS.
It's not available via MSDN *or* TechNet. We have MSDN Universal and TechNet subscriptions. Even at that, those licenses aren't legal to use in production.
So, this is a case where we're at fault as we don't want to replace the equipment in order to get something that'll run XP better. Yet, given that this is fully functional and doesn't NEED to be replaced, I fault MS for not realizing that *many* out in this great wide world have legacy PCs that are perfectly operable save access to a smaller-footprint OS.