It is quite simple:
- There is no way you can use SambaPOS V5 or V4 on Windows Embedded POSReady 2009 (or Windows XP). There is no workaround. You just have to accept it.
- If you already have an old system with POSReady 2009, you cannot upgrade it yourself to POSReady 7. You need to wipe it and install a fresh copy of Windows 7 or above. You won’t be “locked in” to using POSReady 2009 - but you just need to install fresh Windows using installation media and select the option for clean / fresh install as you can’t upgrade from POSReady 2009. But like other suggest, it depends on your hardware specification and how old it is if you can install (and properly use) Windows 7 or greater. If you want you can give the basic hardware specs (processor, RAM, hard disk size) here and I can give general comment. I do know some hardware suppliers have been selling (and still do) POSReady 2009 until recently so it might not be the case your hardware is too old, just misguided hardware suppliers still using it.
Also @JTRTech, @emre - on a side note, POSReady 2009 end of support lifecycle from Microsoft is actually April 9, 2019 and end of license (which is when the license can no longer be used for new installations) is February 11, 2024. This is why some hardware suppliers are still using it, and the long lifecycle for support is because it is an embedded software. However, in reality, I found because it is based on XP, you can’t get updates anymore via Windows Update, which goes against the end of support from Microsoft. I would imagine that you should still be able to get manually installed security updates from Microsoft for POSReady 2009 but I have no idea how given all updates it uses are for Windows XP.
EDIT: Actually I just found this article that says POSReady 2009 still gets updates to April 2019. I was sure that the system I tested before was not getting updates from Windows Update but maybe it was not related to this. Anyway, irrelevant to this original post but still interesting to know.