Windows 10

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Many of our customers have asked us about upgrading their SwiftPOS Touch Point of Sale Terminals to Windows 10 from the currently installed operating system. Our answer is nearly always “No, Don’t Do It”. Why not? Although a POS terminal may look like a standard PC, appears to be running a Windows operating system, behaves like a standard windows operating system, the fact is it’s a little bit different. These specialty operating systems are typically cut down and modified versions of the parent operating system. They are also generally released at a much later date and have had many of the bugs ironed out of them and will perform in a much more stable way.

Point of Sale terminals are required to operate day-in day-out and businesses rely on them to perform financial transactions with their customers consistently. This makes the importance of reliability over speed the biggest factor for a POS System. Peripherals (receipt printers, customer displays etc) connected to the system also play an important role in the decision not to upgrade. These devices have very specific software drivers and interfaces written for them and many (read: most) do not write new software drivers for updated operating systems. If they do it may be 6-12 months till it is released. A manufacturer will typically release a new model of the device with upgraded drivers for the most current operating systems. Manufacturers also may provide information on their websites with regards to compatibility and known issues.

Upgrading the operating system on a POS terminal is little more than a suicide mission without extensive research on the POS Software, Hardware Drivers and Peripheral drivers.

SwiftPOS Touch Point of Sale Software is Windows 10 compatible. The POS Terminal and Peripheral Drivers your system is using may not be.