66% of All Windows Users Still Use Windows XP

An anonymous reader writes "Almost one year after the introduction of Windows 7 it appears that the hype surrounding it has faded. The overall market share of Windows has turned into a slight decline again. Windows 7 is gaining share, but cannot keep pace with the loss of Windows XP and Vista. Especially Windows XP users seem to be happy with what they have and appear to be rather resistant to Microsoft's pitches that it is time to upgrade to Windows 7."

Comments

old hardware, probably

[bsDaemon]

That's probably the same as saying 66% of all Windows users are on older hardware which was already "good enough." They probably won't get Windows 7 until they buy a new computer. I have Win 7 x64 Pro in a VMWare image and it works relatively well in there, but I had to tweak the settings for the container, and if I run it with less than 2GB of memory allocated, it starts to get pissy. Maybe its different when running it on the physical machine, but I'm somewhat skeptical, and if I were running on an older PC, I'd probably skip the software upgrade and wait for a hardware upgrade.

Re:old hardware, probably

[schnikies79]

There are few reasons to upgrade hardware anymore unless you are a gamer or do ultra high end work. There hasn't been anything worthy since the introduction of the c2d. I have a 2008 unibody macbook and will most likely stick with this for the next several years.

I maintain the computers for most of my family. All are running XP and have no intention of upgrading hardware or the OS anytime soon. Most are running XP on core 2 duos or Pentium 4s.

Re:old hardware, probably

[SpryGuy]

Couldn't disagree with you more.

Search works fine. Works great. Of course, you have to know how to use it...

I'm an advance user, and a software devleoper. I live in Windows every day. Windows 7 is so vastly superior to XP that I don't even know where to start. Everything I do is faster and easer in Windows 7. There are more "power-user" short-cuts and keystrokes and features in Windows 7 than XP ever even dreamed of.

It's actually painful for me to go back to XP. I can't find anything. It's annoying as hell.

For advanced users, Windows 7 just plain WORKS BETTER than XP, on pretty much every level. I'm not sure how you can possibly say otherwise.

Re:old hardware, probably

[CarpetShark]

eventually sold it on ebay for ~$30 because it wouldn't run anything newer than IE5 or Safari 2, both of which failed to render the web properly.

Which demonstrates the real issue quite nicely: it's not about OS's or apps anymore. Desktops are seen as overly thick web clients with a word processor.

I still use XP

[argStyopa]

I still use xp.

Everything I've seen suggests that Win7 is a better OS - stability, security, etc.
However we have 6 computers in the house. Two are 3.0+ GHz dual+ CPUs with 4 gigs of RAM; those are the only two that I suspect would run it well. The other 4 range from 2.7 GHz 4 gig RAM (my older gaming rig, that probably could run it) down to a 1 GHz Athlon with 1 gig of RAM.

XP runs "well enough" for everything we want/need to do. I'm uninterested in climbing another learning curve so I can admin 2 different OS's in my house. I'm uninterested in buying new hardware just to all run Win7. I'm uninterested in buying 6 licenses of Win7.

So....no Win7 here, although I readily agree it would probably be a better system on the hardware that could run it. Sorry Microsoft.

I'm not changing in Protest

[Anti Cheat]

When MS announced that dx10(and up) would not be upgraded in XP and would only be available in win7 (vista doesn't count), I felt cheated. Something that is basically a driver standard should be included in any xp maintenance release. What MS did was strictly a marketing ploy in my mind and an attempt to get money out of my pocket. Considering that this was when xp was very much the main operating system at the time and the announcement came out before there was any new OS, it just seemed to be a pretty shabby trick especially on gamers. So I'm resisting getting win7 until I absolutely have no choice because something I need to do requires win7. Until then I have a reasonable OS on this comp, linux on my other one and see no need to spend hundreds of dollars for basically what I see as $50 worth of upgrades that apply to me. The rest is just worthless junk that in some cases is more of an impediment than anything else.