Upgrading to Windows 10 – Problems and Potential Pitfalls

For months our customers with Windows 7 were plagued by notifications to update to Windows 10, in many cases the upgrade seemed to happen against the will of our customers because someone accidentally clicked a link that accepted the Windows 10 upgrade.

Whenever these Windows 10 upgrades happened they often left our customers unable to utilize their dental software and often would disable important dental diagnostic equipment because the drivers would no longer run on the new Windows 10.

So this leaves us with a question that is always posed by a new Windows operating system coming out. Windows 8 was an operating system that was so inappropriate for a professional setting that we have completely skipped over its use much like Vista and Windows ME.

There are going to be hardware reasons to move to Windows 10 such as how the operating system interfaces with AHCI Sata drives and the problems Windows 7 can have with this. There are also some other benefits to Windows 10, but because dental software is what it is then there will be a great number of dental customers who will not be able to move to Windows 10 because either their dental software or their diagnostic hardware such as intra oral cameras or intra oral digital xray sensors will likely not work because of driver incompatibility issues.

We have already found a great deal of problems with specific software and hardware in Windows 10.

  • Eaglesoft Version 17 is not compatible according to their support, we have seen it functioning but it is not supported so if anything goes wrong you will have no assistance
  • The Black CDR 2000 Schick Remote Interfaces are not compatible with Windows 10 and there is no plan to write drivers to make them compatible
  • Gendex EHD is currently listed as not being compatible, we have made the sensor work in certain cases, but once again this is a situation where the manufacturer is not supporting it and if there are any problems then there were will be no technical support
  • Suni Sensors older than Dr. Suni 2000 Interface are not compatible with Windows 10

 

These are our known incompatibilities list and we are finding more issues on a daily bases with different dental software packages.

This is a problem with new operating systems when it comes to dental. You need to create a list of literally every software on your systems, every piece of hardware that plugs into them and go through the compatibility lists on all the manufacturers websites and be sure they actually support the new operating system.

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