What special considerations exist for Vista?

Microsoft Vista is a relatively new operating system with a large number of changes from previous versions of Windows. This means it has not had a long period of wide spread use, so may not be suitable for Retail use where reliability requirements are much higher than typical PC usage.

Licences get prompted for Each User

Vista security runs applications in a way that prevents them for writing to parts of the registry that where permitted under previous versions of Windows. The POS uses the registry to store licence keys. Vista stores these licences in a user specific HKLM area, which means user B cannot see a licence entered by user A.

To solve this problem, just any of the following workarounds that suit you best.

1. Enter the licence key for each user. This will only be required once per user.
2. Right click on the POS, and select "Run as administrator" before entering a licence, this will permit the POS to store the licence in the correct place within the registry.
3. Edit the file fpos.ctl (located in the POS folder) and add the following line at the top of this file
   licence:XXXXYYYY
   where XXXXYYYY is the licence for the machine.

Shared drives on Vista do not work

There are numerous problems with Vista and file shares. At this time Fieldpine are not supporting POS installations using network shared drives. This only applies to shared configurations which are not common and require specific manual setup. A normal POSGreen 2007 system does not use shared drives and is not affected.

If you must use shared drives, we suggest the following

1. Review Microsoft Article KB935366 and consider installing this hotfix.
2. Alternatively, place the shared database on a Windows XP box, rather than Vista.
3. (advanced) Consider disabling the SMB2 protocol on the Vista server. This appears to immediately correct many issues.

THIS ARTICLE APPLIES TO

• POSGreen (Version V2.7.1.1430 and greater)