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.
I’m running either W10, W7 or XP depending on the need of the moment. I also have a Linux drive too which I’m slowly transitioning to.
I would use Winaero to help if I get Win10 on my desktop pc.
I use XYplorer as my default windows folder. I can adjust the font, change background color and adjust the spacing of the file names plus adjust the thumbnail size of images.
https://www.xyplorer.com
Powertoys from Microsoft does a few things.
https://winaero.com/powertoys-stable-version-0-29-0-is-now-available/
#59 & 61. The maker of the pc would have all the drivers at their site. Download them and copy to a usb drive and then plug in your old hard drive to the new pc and startup the pc. Any driver conflicts in Device manager you should be able to install the drivers from the usb drive to fix.
I needed to have a secure computer for taxes, etc...so my new laptop has win 10...but my husbands older one still has win 7....
Computer power supplies are indeed switching power supplies and when they go out of spec can generate a ton of hash on the AM Radio band.
Know what else is a switching power supply? Those wall warts that come with every stupid device now. I've lost track of how many of those were bad and generated RF hash in my amateur radio equipment. One of those can also be the culprit. Only way to find out is to go around the house unplugging them one at a time and see if the noise goes away.
True, and that works -- but it's one of two ways. :-) The other is to walk around the house with a hand-held AM radio. Just hold it near each wall-wart and sweep the tuner frequency -- the bad ones will usually reveal themselves.
“I have found zero benefit to using Win 10 over Win 7.”
Ditto.
Boot takes from 5 to 20 minutes. WTH?
Combined with Office 365 and its retarded Outlook...it sucks.
Coders have lost control of their mashup creature.
I’d go back to XP in a heartbeat.
When work PCs (under total control of work IT, the real controllers of the company) are gone from my life, so will bloatware/spyware Windows and bloatware apps that require it. I will crack a good bottle to celebrate my divorce from it.
“Some of us believe, “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.””
Shush! THAT thinking does NOT provide jobs for coders and all the H1b visitors.
Yup, did that too! An old am/fm shower radio I had was the best for finding bad wall warts. It also helped me find a break in my dogs invisible fence, saving me a service call and rerunning the wires.
Wife’s laptop, will check for this when she stops facef*ck for a while.
Went to Win 10 a year ago with fear and trembling. It’s been fine - one old game doesn’t run on it, the rest do. Did the free update from 8.1 to 10 on my old laptop also with no issues. Seems to be a good, stable OS.
Not only that, but if you use those features yourself, Open Orifice is going to be a slog. I do have and use OO, but also have the paid version of Softmaker Office. I think the spreadsheet is better than Calc, but I kinda like Writer better than the WP. I still use theirs sometimes though. The only place I find Excel really, uh, excels, is very large spreadsheets like hundreds of thousands of cells with array formulas, etc. Seems to handle memory and threads better. Normal spreadsheets, Planmaker is way better.
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