Respectfully you have no idea what you're talking about. These half-million dollar devices (often more expensive than that) were the ONLY option at the time to perform certain kinds of experiments. Not exactly a choice.
Respectfully you have no idea how complex an OS is and how completely nonsensical it is to expect 100% backwards compatibility for 2 decades later. There is a reason software gets sunsetted: most of it is irrelevant 20 years later and holding on to it makes everything much more complex than it already is. Especially for a consumer OS like windows, where you can expect the vast majority of people to upgrade.
If this is some multi-million dollar device then maybe keeping it up to date with windows should have been part of the deal...
I'm not sure what part of my comment you're responding to because I wasn't referring to anything related to backwards compatibility. I was responding to the other commenter asserting that biotech companies have somehow made an incorrect judgement call by purchasing certain types of instrument. In reality these vendors assume you're going to keep the system air-gapped forever, some don't even (officially) support joining their control PCs to a domain. Anecdotally I've found that in a lot of cases unless you're dealing with strange custom drivers usually the vendor-provided PCs can be replaced with new computers running the same control software (sometimes in compatibility mode if needed) and still operate the instrument.
So the vendor refuses to sell a support plan and requires you to purchase a brand new machine? That does sound monopolistic and abusive but I don’t see how Microsoft is to blame.
