Hi. I read recently that Microsoft will be soon withdrawing all support for IE browser. How would that affect my existing Dress Shop and My Pattern Designer installations? They are the main thing I have currently running on Windows Vista, which maybe I'd now have to update to the last Windows version to use IE?
Thanks. C in Australia.

Withdrawing support means that they will no longer provides security fixes or updates or fix bugs. IE will continue to work. One day, I don't know when, with newer versions of Windows, IE will no longer be able to run on those. But IE, and Dress Shop, will continue to work on any computer where it is working now.

One solution, available now, is to run Dress Shop in a "PC emulator", which is just an application that pretends to be a computer running a specific version of Windows. Those applications are known as "virtual machines".

You can can Windows programs in the virtual machine and it will look and feel like you're running on an actual Windows computer. In fact, this is how I test and maintain Dress Shop: I use a Mac and I run an emulator application on it, VirtualBox. I can run any Windows program in a VirtualBox virtual machine.

We have ideas about modernizing Dress Shop, but they are just... sketches on napkins, at the moment.

Thanks. I also use a Mac, running Windows in a different emulator.