Article summaries and takeaways for readers of The Dental IT Brief. Dates are source-article publication dates, rather than evidence of email delivery. Available Spanish summaries link to complete English articles.
Modern dental practices depend on software for scheduling, charting, imaging, claims, treatment planning, recall, payments, and patient communication. When systems slow down, disconnect, fail to sync, or stop working, the disruption spreads across the office quickly. In many cases, the software is only where the problem appears. The real cause may be aging workstations, weak networks, inconsistent updates, permissions, integrations, storage, security tools, or missing proactive maintenance.
By Dental IT Team
Key takeaways
Dental software problems often come from the surrounding IT environment, not only the software itself.
Slow Open Dental, Eaglesoft freezing, Dexis imaging issues, login errors, and broken integrations can all point to deeper infrastructure problems.
Proactive IT maintenance helps dental practices reduce recurring software friction, downtime, staff frustration, and patient care delays.
Dental practices running Dentrix on Windows 10 should treat the 2026 support cutoff as an urgent technology planning issue. Windows 10 has already reached end of support from Microsoft, and Dentrix support for Windows 10 environments is being phased out in 2026. For dental offices, this is not only a software compatibility issue. It affects cybersecurity, HIPAA-conscious safeguards, downtime risk, workstation replacement planning, and the ability to keep patient care moving without last-minute disruption.
By Dental IT Team
Key takeaways
Dentrix practices still using Windows 10 should audit every workstation and server before the 2026 support cutoff creates avoidable disruption.
Windows 10 has reached end of support from Microsoft, which increases cybersecurity and compliance risk for systems that access electronic protected health information.
The safest plan is to identify which computers can move to Windows 11, replace hardware that cannot, and prepare Dentrix workstation settings before migration.
