Walked into a coffee shop in Portland that still uses Windows 7 on their POS system

I was grabbing a latte and noticed the screen was definitely running an old OS, so I asked the owner about it and he said they just never bothered to update because it still works - have any of you seen places running seriously outdated software like that and said something?

3 comments

3 Comments

reese_lee91mo ago

Actually, Windows 7 isn't that old for POS systems. A lot of credit card terminals and restaurant POS software was designed for 7 and never got updated for 10 or 11. The bigger issue is that Microsoft stopped giving security updates for Windows 7 back in 2020, so if that system is connected to the internet or handles payment info, it's a huge security risk. I'd be more worried about how they're protecting customer data than the OS version itself. Did you notice if they were using a modern card reader or one that looked like it was from 2010?

murphy.tessa1mo ago

Hear you on the security updates being a problem, but I gotta push back a little. A lot of those older POS terminals aren't even hooked up to the internet in the way we think, they run on a closed network, so the risk isn't as huge as people make it sound.

grant4781mo ago

Actually Windows 7 extended security updates were available until January 2023 for businesses that paid for them, so it's not quite true that they stopped completely in 2020. I worked with a restaurant that paid for those updates for a couple years because their inventory software wouldn't run on anything newer. But yeah, by now even those paid updates are gone, so that coffee shop is definitely running unpatched if they didn't pay. The bigger thing is that a lot of old POS systems use a serial port or USB connection to the card reader that's basically standalone, so even if the main PC is vulnerable the payment data goes straight to the processor. Did you see what kind of card reader they had?