and never had a virus or malware.
Posted on 12/31/2020 7:14:13 AM PST by dayglored
Microsoft officially ended support for its one-time flagship operating system, Windows 7, at the start of 2020. As the year draws to a close, I ran the numbers to see how many PCs are still running this unsupported OS. Spoiler: It's a big number...
With a heartfelt nod to Monty Python, Windows 7 would like you all to know that it's not dead yet.
A year after Microsoft officially ended support for its long-running OS, a small but determined population of PC users would rather fight than switch. How many? No one knows for sure, but that number has shrunk substantially in the past year.
On the eve of Microsoft's Windows 7 end-of-support milestone, I consulted some analytics experts and calculated that the owners of roughly 200 million PCs worldwide would ignore that deadline and continue running their preferred OS. That was, admittedly, a rough estimate. (If you want to do the math yourself, read my year-ago post, "It's 2020: How many PCs are still running Windows 7?")
During the holiday lull at the end of 2020, I decided to go back and run the latest version of those analytics reports. They tell a consistent story.
Let's start with the United States Government Digital Analytics Program, which reports a running, unfiltered total of visitors to U.S. websites over the previous 90 days. One of the datasets includes a report of visits from all PCs running any version of Windows, which makes it an ideal proxy for this question.
At the end of December 2019, 75.8% of those PCs were running Windows 10, 18.9% were still on Windows 7, and a mere 4.6% were sticking with the unloved Windows 8.x.
A year later, as December 2020 draws to a close, the proportion of PCs running Windows 10 has gone up 12%, to 87.8%; the Windows 7 count has dropped by more than 10 points, to 8.5%, and the population of Windows 8.x holdouts has shrunk even further, to a minuscule 3.4%. (The onetime champion of PC operating systems, Windows XP, is now nearly invisible, with its device count adding up to a fraction of a rounding error.)
If my calculations a year ago were on the mark, that means more than 100 million Windows PC were retired, recycled, or upgraded in the past 12 months.
Other metrics tell a nearly identical story.
At NetMarketShare, for example, the numbers at the end of 2020 show Windows 10 usage up 11 points, from 63.0% to 74.0%, while Windows 7 usage dropped 9.5 points, from 31.2% to 21.7%.
Likewise, StatCounter Global Stats showed the number of PCs running Windows 10 increased more than 12 percent, from 64.7% to 76.0%, while the Windows 7 PC population dropped nearly 10 points to 17.7%.
Turning those percentages into whole numbers isn't a matter of simple division, unfortunately, because we don't know the denominator. Microsoft has told us for years that the Windows user base is 1.5 billion, but I argued a year ago that the number of Windows PCs is probably much lower than that, even with a pandemic-induced resurgence in PC sales. Even allowing for that uncertainty, it's clear that at least 100 million PCs are still running Windows 7, and that number could be significantly higher.
Some of those holdouts are paying Microsoft for the privilege of receiving security updates, although it's not clear how many are part of the Extended Security Update program. And those customers will face more pressure to upgrade in 2021 as the cost of those updates is set to double.
A software engineer buddy bought a 10 year old Mac just for testing purposes but found it ran circles around newer Win 10 machines and bought a new M1 Macbook and loves it. To him, it is a productivity tool and he no longer has to fight his tools.
What did Apple do with all that money they’ve made? Invested in R&D to develop a CPU that is superior to anything Intel has that consumes a fraction of the power, is what.
https://www.tomsguide.com/news/macbook-pro-m1-benchmarks-are-in-and-they-destroy-intel
My wife has one old laptop with WIN7 on it.
She rarely uses it, and I’m just plain too lazy to upgrade it since it’s not used much.
Everything else here is running on a Mac with LibreOffice and Thunderbird mail. The Macs are all old ones too.
No more Microsoft here if we can help it.
Good advice, with a caveat.
I've used that suite for decades, starting with StarOffice, OpenOffice, and most recently LibreOffice. It's improved tremendously over time, and compatibility is almost 100%.
Keyword: "Almost".
Standard, simple Word docs and Excel spreadsheets work fine. But I still find some more complex ones, that rely on advanced features of the recent Microsoft suites, are not 100% compatible. The problems arise when I get a document that was created in MS-Office, I work on it in LibreOffice, and then send it back to the original creator. They open it in MS-Office, and "It doesn't look right any more."
So I agree with ShadowAce, and I DO recommend LibreOffice. With the caveat that with regard to trading documents back and forth with Microsoft users, it's advisable to "Trust But Verify".
That said, Office 2003 (with the file conversion pack for .docx, etc.) is going to have a rough time with complex modern docs too. :-)
With constant suggestions to upgrade my Windows 7 to Windows 10, I finally did so. Bad mistake! It wiped out many of the programs I use and my computer now thinks I am in either Denmark or Norway.
and never had a virus or malware.
Why would I upgrade? I have very expensive legacy software that will not run on Win 10. If I upgraded, it would force me to “lease” this software, not purchase, because that is the new business model.
I installed Windows 8 on a custom PC that I had built and successfully updated the OS to the current Windows 10 right up until the most recent official update from Microsoft. It won’t install and the computer was not bootable.
The fix was to get it booted by other means, set the Windows 10 version back a couple of updates and turn off automatic updating. Good for a few more years - maybe.
Did it put you in a 14-day travel quarantine? :-)
BE VERY CAUTIOUS
The official free upgrade went away many years ago. What remain are mostly MALWARE versions that have poisoned variants of the upgrade installer.
I DO NOT recommend trying to get a "free" upgrade to Windows 10 any more, unless somehow you can verify that the installer is the original one from Microsoft. All others are very suspect.
And you still have to activate the fake upgrade somehow. It can be done, but again, BEWARE of sites claiming to have "activation codes" -- they are mostly MALWARE and can infect your computer just by hitting the webpage.
I have 5 running 7.
Moved the xp machine virtual.
Much of the decline in Windows use is due to moving to Chromebooks.
I have some essential (to me) software that doesn’t like Win 10 and for which there’s no good alternative. I have a small stable of Win 7 machines, all air gapped. For the internet I use Linux.
Win7 laptop and desktop here.
Win10 on a tablet — it is the most frustrating OS I have ever tried to use. I just use the tablet for online radio now. I revert back to the Win7’s to do anything productive.
Linux Mint Cinnamon 8.3 laptop — I am liking Linux more and more.
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Adobe Flash is supposed to end today. It will be interesting to see how some websites/browsers adjust.
I still use Windows 7 on my desktop pc as it just works.
I have Windows 10 on a few laptops but hardly use them.
Windows 10 is adware and spyware and cannot be easily configured the way I want things to look. I like the Start menu of 10 but little else. It is earlier versions of Windows that someone picked up and dropped then tried to rearrange back together again. Confusing interface and again you are spied on.
It’s not upgrading. It’s a new operating system, and one that does dumb things and breaks things that worked well in 7.
First of all, Microsoft, fix what you have. One update to 7 broke the downloader/windows updater, so it could not download/update a fix for itself, and so one of my 7 pc’s remains at an update level from about 3 years ago.
“Updates are where the money is”
I wonder why, after 10 or so years of updates, Windows 7 would have any problems other than holes in its internet security.
I don’t care about security because I do frequent backups and hacking into my computer would be a waste of time for the hacker.
I was just thinking about that two days ago.
FedEx Freight’s LTL rate calculator page requires Adobe Flash Player to work.
At we have a training site that uses Adobe Flash. The web browsers would warn and ask to activate Flash since last January 2020 but the company only made the switch to non Flash version just today! Right down to the wire.
Adobe itself will disable Flash player from playing any content on January 12.
I upgraded to Windows 10 years ago on my Windows PC (I also have boxes running OpenBSD and various Linuxes). It’s the machine I’m using for work-from-home - running scrums for several dev teams and MS Teams work conferences. It hasn’t been problem-free, but it’s within acceptable limits, certainly fewer problems than I’d have trying to use Windows 7 for work-from-home. I realize folks who stick with Windows 7 have their reasons, but I don’t know what those reasons are.
I keep an old Windows 7 clunker around for the occasional need, but use a Chromebook these days for web stuff and email.
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