May 02, 2017 Upgrade Windows Embedded devices to Windows 10.; 2 minutes to read; In this article. This topic describes the supported installation paths for upgrading Windows Embedded devices. Customers must have a license for Windows 10 Enterprise to.
Windows Xp Embedded Download
As you may remember, Microsoft is curtailing support for Intel-based Skylake PCs, the company now says Windows Embedded devices using Intel’s sixth-generation Core Skylake processors are no exception. Microsoft has announced that such devices will need to be upgraded to Windows 10 by July of 2017.
Microsoft announced this week that Windows Embedded users aren’t going to receive any leeway from the company for their affinity to stick with an older desktop operating system version. The company says that Windows Embedded users — much like any other Windows PC user – must upgrade to Windows by mid-2017. For those unaware, Windows Embedded machines are those that are used in point-of-sale systems, health and other industries.
“Through July 17, 2017, Skylake devices running Windows Embedded 7, 8 and 8.1 will be supported according to the lifecycle support policy for those products. During the 18-month support period, these systems should be upgraded to Windows 10 to continue receiving support after the period ends,” the company wrote in a support document.
Failure to update to Windows 10, the desktop operating system it released in July last year, will make users ineligible to receive critical security updates. The company insists that it will seed updates provided it does not risk the “reliability or compatibility” of the Windows Embedded machines running on Windows 7, Windows 8, or Windows 8.1.
Earlier this year, Microsoft announced that all new processors moving forward need to support the latest Windows platform at that time for support. The company’s move comes part of its growing efforts to ensure that every machine is powered by Windows 10. As of January 2016, more than 200 million devices worldwide are actively running Windows 10. Microsoft is aiming to get 1 billion devices to run Windows 10 in the next two-three years.
Probably the second most common question I get from people starting to use XP Embedded is 'Why can't I update my Embedded runtime directly from the Windows Update web site?' (the first question I get is 'Are you Windows CE?' <grin>). Here are some of the reasons I respond with.
Windows Update has no knowledge of Embedded as an OS platform, therefore there is no built-in logic to assess what features (and files) are present on the runtime. This means that Windows Update would blindly push down all security updates that were not already present on the runtime, whether they were appropriate or not. There are a number of reasons why this is a scary scenario:
Windows Xp Embedded Security Patches
- Windows update packages include a payload that contains previous versions of files, which facilitates 'roll-back' to a previous version of a file if the updated one causes a problem. This has footprint implications, because the install packages may be bigger than desired on an Embedded device. Also, XP Embedded does not support Add/Remove, so it would not support rolling back to a previous version.
- XP Embedded does not have Windows File Protection. This means there is nothing to prevent the updated version of a file from overwriting the original one and causing other applications and features to break because of versions incompatibility.
- Applying unnecessary updates to the device could cause it to run out of disk or memory space and to crash- having your Embedded device 'blue-screen' in the field is not on any customer's wish list.
Ultimately the owner of the image would lose all control of that image, and not be able to reliably see what state it was in.
Some people may ask why Windows Embedded Point of Service devices, which are built on top of XP Embedded, can support servicing through Windows Update. This is because WEPOS is a 'known' configuration, in other words it is a fixed platform with known features that do not change significantly. This means that when feature updates are being labeled for the Operating Systems they are applicable to it is possible to easily identify if they are appropriate for WEPOS or not because the same features are always guaranteed to be on the system. Obviously an XP Embedded image could an infinite combinations of features in any image.
Windows Xp Embedded Upgrade
So what are the options for servicing XPe? For small footprint devices or ones not in a large enterprise environment Device Update Agent may be the way to go. For deployments in larger connected environments both WSUS ands SMS can be used. In the case of SMS, updates are downloaded from Windows Update to the SMS server and then the IT Administrator decides which updates are appropriate for the Embedded devices she has connected to their network and would make only those updates available for pull down by the SMS client on the Embedded device.