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Comment by amiga386

10 hours ago

I can't speak for medical equipment, but lab equipment in testing labs (including the ones in hospitals) needs to be calibrated correctly and run exactly to the vendor's specifications. They will continue to sign off on old hardware they continue to support, even if it's actually a Pentium 3 running Windows 95 with the expensive lab device attached via the parallel port.

If you try and switch out the host computer to something newer, the software may or may not work, but you will definitely fail your audits for changing software without the vendor's approval.

For their part, the vendor supports you buying the new version of their device for a few million quid and it now runs via USB attached to a Windows 10 computer running their proprietary software.