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@Andreas

At least in the US - Zeiss did its last deliveries the 510 in mid 2008 - but the retirement was announced in early 2007 (so ‘almost’ 10 - 8 exactly) :)  

However there were 2 variations of the 510 - and the ones with the older ECU boxes Zeiss stopped using in 2005 tend to be the ones being ‘retired’ with greater frequency.  The ones with the larger laser module use TCPIP to talk to the hardware so those should accept PC upgrades with modern hardware more easily.

@Torsten

The problem is less on the software side and more on the hardware side.  Modern motherboards do not support the specific early generation PCI SCSI card that Zeiss used in XP - and in around 2005 (with in the introduction of the LSM LIVE) Zeiss changed out the SCSI ECU for a ethernet based controller.  So this issue only effects the systems that use this old ECU and changing to XP wouldn’t help the fact that newer PCs cannot support this card.  There are of course ways around this - and Zeiss has done it for Windows 7 - but they only present this solution on their PC upgrades.

The cool thing is that there are so many LSM 510 systems around that third party service companies (and users for that matter) can and will try to make these systems function and provide service if Zeiss ever stops.  LSMTech is a good example of this (http://www.lsmtech.com/ <http://www.lsmtech.com/>).