Security company Avast has published global Windows usage data as part of the PC Trends Report (PDF document) for the first quarter of 2017, revealing that Windows 7 continues to lead the market with a share that’s close to 50 percent.




While it’s important to note that these figures come from computers running Avast, they do align with the statistics provided by research firms whose main activity is monitoring operating system usage, so there’s a good chance these are accurate.

First and foremost, there’s leader Windows 7. According to Avast, the operating system launched in 2009 is currently powering more than 56 million computers where its antivirus product is installed, and this means a share of no less than 48.35 percent.

Windows 10 is growing, the security firm says, and it managed to reach a share of 30.46 percent, which accounts for a little over 35 million devices running Avast security software.

Windows XP still a super-popular choice
But what’s a little more worrying for everyone, including here Microsoft, users, and Avast itself, is that Windows XP, which was launched in 2001 and no longer receives security updates since April 2014, is still running on more than 6.5 million computers. This means that it has a share of 5.64 percent, more than Windows 8 (2.51 percent) and Windows Vista (2.08 percent) combined.

Windows 8 was launched in 2012 as Microsoft’s new revolution, but its small market share is mostly the result of most people choosing the free upgrade to Windows 8.1. The OS launched one year later has a share of 10.96 percent, which represents 12.7 million PCs running Avast.

For what it’s worth, Windows Vista is also reaching end of support next month, so users who are still running this OS, and there are at least 2 million according to Avast, should already start planning the upgrade. Windows 10 is the safest bet right now, as Windows 7 itself is also projected to reach EOL in January 2020.

Source: Softpedia

 

Last edited by a moderator: Mar 27, 2017

Just wondering how many of you run their DAW in XP x64.

 

XP users base could be larger but if most of the today hardware would still be compatible with it. Actually using Win7 until hardware will not be supported anymore.

 

XP no longer receive security updates, therefore it's "worrysome" that 6.5 mil. users are using it?
What a strange logic.
If we talk viruses, then the best ones are cross platform. Ransomware runs on any NT-based Windows pretty much the same. For all other users, the first frontier defending their OS from these threats is an up-to-date antivirus, not security updates.
There might be very small correlation between an up-to-date Win10 and now-defunct WinXP in terms of infection rate, but to my knowledge, no-one made any statistics or tests, so it's all just speculation.
All in all, it's always the user who get their machine infected, or allow that to happen.

3 years of everyday surfing on unsupported WinXP yield you guessed it, no infections. And that's without AV.
If XPx64 wasn't so bad, I'd still be using it, but the compatibility isn't up to speed with Win7.

I'd guess that large portion of that WinXP cake piece are POSready machines, officially supported until 2019.

 

For me anything other than XP and W7 is unacceptable, unnecessary, and it would give me a lot of headache. W7 already gave me a bit of a headache with firewire problems that are circumventable when you know how [lots of tweaking]. Also, XP has the best [still not great but...] MIDI out timing. As I'm running many external samplers and synths over MIDI it is extremely important for me. MIDI timing is extremely sensitive to background processes, even more than ASIO. Even USB MIDI timing is better on XP. I'm using all MIDI outputs I have - 3 from MIDEX-3 and 2 from RME HDSP card. RME's MIDI is nevertheless tighter so I use it for playing MPD-32 [drumpads] and my main keyboard K2000. Midex-3 is used with a laptop computer on the side that is used for non-critical MIDI timing stuff, and it runs W7. XPx64 is on the main computer. Works perfectly. Main computer with XP is also used for editing samples over SCSI, and I use heaps of old audio applications that might even have troubles running on W7 on it, and the laptop/ $100 USB interface / $100 2 octave MIDI keyboard youngster warriors around here would have troubles working with them.

I can't understand this obsession with updates and upgrades. It is only important, and even then somewhat important, if you use Internet on it and if you visit dodgy sites. I use no antiviruses, also. Never had any problems with any malware or viruses. It has also something to do with one's proficiency in using computers, I must admit. I simply know what I shouldn't run/open, and what I shouldn't click. I sometimes use W7 to visit a couple of sites and download software, but it's generally offline. The main computer is completely offline, except when I'm using Debian Linux on a separate hard disk. I have Debian on the laptop, too, for when I carry it around and I need Internet.

In short: if it works or if it's needed to run some old apps, with older drivers and older hardware, it is what you need to run. Not W7, nor W8, and the least W10. The more background tasks, the more problems with low ASIO latencies, firewire and USB.

Microsoft couldn't care less about musicians and producers, and every new OS they release is worse than the one before, not just for audio, but general performance, even though it might seem to you that it runs faster. It's all just caching to RAM and HD tricks that make them seem faster and boot faster. We are only marginal part of the OS market, so why should they care, on the other hand? All MS care of is 95% of users who use their OS for Internet and office applications, playing games and videos, graphics apps.

My suggestion is to run whatever you need to be able to use your hardware efficiently and without any problems. If your hardware needs W10, or W8, install these. But my "good Samaritan" suggestion is to always go with the lowest version of MS OS that works with it, for your sanity's sake, and to be able to use your computer to the fullest. Don't let the OS come between you and what you like to use to make music!

I'll be using this configuration for as long as I have studio like this, and I really like it this way. It is highly flexible and loads of fun, hybrid analogue/digital studio that sounds great! If I used only software I would run W7 on all computers until my software stopped working with it. But when you're using only software it is *so* much easier to just use whatever you prefer, even W10. The only thing to keep in mind is, though: the newer the MS OS - the less efficient it is for real-time audio applications. If you run 20 plugins and make simple music just for fun, or to impress your girlfriend, you don't have to care about that, of course.

p.s. Good old ATARI still has the best MIDI timing, bar none. I'm still tempted to buy one again, just for MIDI and Cubase. For professional and specialised usage, and computer music is both, you use what you have to use, and what is best to use. There's no OS that is "in" or "out" for making music. That's really shallow, narrow, backwards thinking, and unprofessional.

 

Last edited: Mar 27, 2017

In case of laptops, CPU performance had a setback during the last years, since the U-CPUs came up. today a midrange laptop with i5-CPU can be slower than a midrange-i5-laptop from 2012. It's all about (made-up ?) consumer needs. people won't need - in most cases - CPU performance, but a quick system start, and since nobody cares that a computer can be up in two seconds from standby, since, like decades, the manufacturer had to optimize the boot process for the sake of those damn yt boot comparison videos.
Next, the demand for x64 is growing since a few years, although x64 is definitevly NOT faster than x86. Today, no new computer is shipped with x86 OS pre-installed, and I wonder if Windows 11 or 12 will even have that option. I work in CAD for a living, and it is well-known that AutoCad x86 is much faster than x64, so there are third-party-solutions to install the x86 version on a x64 system, which is normally not possible. Not to mention that it is possible to access memory above 4GB from a x86 OS, Windows Server (2003 or 2008) can do that.
But again, it's all user and industry demands. For instance, Windows useres look envious at Apple machines, which are thrice expensive, stylish and optimized for their own hardware, but they do not see that their users are also struggling, for example with incompatibility between OS releases.
If Windows XP would have been enhanced, bugfixed and supported until today, it would not only be boring for people who cry everyday for the 'new' thingy, but the industry would have a serious problem developing new CPU and memory generations, updating their oftware and so on. I think, M$ and Intel have a very thick connection, and the biggest concern is that a computer could run 15 or 20 years without any need to replace it, because since several years they could. We always hear and read that five years are an eternity in product cycles, so everyone accepted this mantra. though it wouldn't be true if it wouldn't be supported by every particpant in the industry. I could easily work with Autocad 14 from the 90's (it's working on Win7 with a few tricks) and deliver the biggest projects with it, enjoying it's starting procedure of roughly 0.1 seconds on a laptop from 2012. But no, we have around 17 incarnations of the product since then, for every one had to be paid a price of approx. 1500,- and countless hours of learning new, needless functions, and trying to come around the problems emerging with those new versions.
In XP, it took a long time until everything went smooth and safe, but once it did, it was a fast, reliable OS. I for myself think of Win7 as an improvement, but it also took some time until it was really stable. I work for my music projects rarely with external MIDI hardware, except for masterkeyboards, and I am quite content with the latency, which may also depend on a motherboard's hardware design. What I do not like is that we do not have infinite USB ports (remember the 's' for serial) but every device is USB, so we have to use for laptops USB Hubs, which are really not ideal, or, in my case, docking stations, which are a bit bulky. so the universal concept for adding hardware to a computer is, up to now, effectively none.
I have an Atari ST 1040 (and I won't sell it . This was clearly a good machine for music producers then, and it had it's market share mainly because of it's MIDI interface, at a time, when most people didn't know what that is. Of course, it had a good OS, and it was known as the cheap Mac, and was widely used for DTP (remeber Calamus ?). I used it with Cubase 1.5 (fat dongle at the side) and Notator (another dongle, had to be changed), and sometimes I start an emulator just to get the feeling, without digging out the hardware from the closet. But - then there were bombs more often than bluescreens today...

 

Concluding that XP today has more users than Vista or Win8 is like saying that there are still more musicians using an Atari ST than the ones using an Amiga or C64

 

there are three primary reasons that windows xp still has a significant number of users. first and foremost, there are a lot of old pcs out there still chugging away that are not capable of running anything newer (or they have expensive older peripherals that can't work with anything newer). second is that the windows xp virtual machine was a very popular free choice when microsoft first started promoting the concept of running virtual machines. third is that it's the easiest version of windows to pirate.

windows 8 is not popular because windows 8 users were given a free update to windows 8.1, which is a significant improvement.

 

Always amuses me when producers and composers jump on the trend bandwagon so they can fit in with the popular crowd.
FFS, its a tool and windows 10 is a mess.

Xp is still on one of my laptops and i would probably use it for my main rig if it wasnt for the ram limitation.Tried 64bit but wasnt as stable as 32bit.
Hesitated a long time(2013) before i switched to Win 7 and wouldnt go back, stable and friendly for my software/hardware.
Worked on a few win10 computers and it was a nightmare, i will probably stay on win7 for many more years.

 

Last edited by a moderator: Mar 27, 2017

@fiction yes, this statistics is irrelevant. It would have been interesting if XP has more userbase than win 10.

@trutzburg: Not only you have to learn countless hours about new features, but you'll need countless hours to disable those "features" to get a machine that is functioning mostly as good as the one did with an OS many years ago.
I'm wonderimg, why there is no market for downgrading machines with W10 to a state quite as good as XP or OS X Sierra to to quite as good as OS X Panther.

 

Well, dinosaurs needs to check their emails too. So why not.

 

London Metropolitan Police is still running XP on 27000 computers. (The number may have dropped in the last 6 months). But they have a plan upgrading all these machines, although only to 8.1

"Market research firm Gartner reckons up to a quarter of business systems and 10% of large organisations are still running XP. SMEs, corporations, multinationals, utility companies, retailers, government – both local and national – and hospitals are all XP. And most ATM machines are still running XP..."

 

I've been testing Windows 10 since early Insider Builds,
got so disappointed that I rather installed OSX El Capitan aside my Windows 7, just in case Microsoft goes full retard, and started to like it so much past weeks I haven't booted Windows 7 at all, not even once,
workstation is rock solid i7-5820K clocked at 4.3GHz on all cores, 32GB ram, and RME HDSPe AIO

 

What problems? With more modern looking icons and GUI shit?

Operating system can be updated to support any new hardware without touching the user interface at all. Just update the OS drivers.

But that wouldn't be profitable, eh? <-- that is the only problem.

 

So wrong. Even Microsoft claims that W10 should work perfectly well with older PCs, and it does, but it works slower than any of the older OSes because it's a bloated, buggy, "Franken OS" piece of excrement made only to bring Microsoft incredible profit at the expense of its holy devotees that would throw themselves off the cliff for the sake of Microsoft for some reason that is absolutely beyond me. Saving capitalism from falling apart?! Wtf is wrong with you? It is the next stage of evolution.

The misconception is this: it doesn't work slower because the computer is old, but because the OS is slower. Think about it for a bit. Fresh XP will work nicely on an old computer, but W10 won't be as snappy. On the other hand XP will simply fly with a new computer! You blame the computer for the OS slowness / inefficiency? hmmm

I blame the programmers for making slower, more inefficient and bloated code, and using slower and inefficient programming tools. I also blame greedy CEOs and stockholders for imposing unbelievable restrictions and extremely stupid new features into newer OSes because they need to buy a newer and bigger yacht, newer and bigger house, newer and bigger car... but it's never enough, eh?

It all comes down to insatiable greed.

 

Last edited: Mar 28, 2017

fvcking chrome doesn't supports XP

 

@SineWave Don't blame the programmers, they are forced by maketing to produce taht shit to bring "a new look and feel" for computer idiots, wich are the mainstream

 

Partially agree. Like all things nothing is black and white.

However, I would like to see these programmers deal with 1-core below 1 GHz processors, 32MB of RAM and 512MB of hard disk, though. That used to be the norm in the 90s. We browsed the web and made music with these. Nowadays 8GB of RAM, hundreds of gigabytes of hard disk and 8-core processors above 2GHz are the norm, but generally I don't feel like the processors and memory is being used for anything so useful. Can anybody explain this? Programming has become so inefficient it's incredible. It disgusts me.

A guy would write a simple shitty music player that is 20MB or so and it's not considered much these days. Let me tell you about 1by1... http://mpesch3.de1.cc/1by1.html Programs used to do so much with just a couple of megabytes. The difference in resource consumption is just too staggering to ignore!

I don't like to upgrade my computer only to find out that it is capable of doing the same thing my 10 yo computer can do with older generation of programs. It is all thanks to inefficient programming. That is some weird kind of progress going on. One step ahead, two steps back.

 

Last edited: Mar 28, 2017

lucky you

 

Exactly what I think. There are so many 'Optimize your system!' 'Make Windows faster!' offers (which are mostly false promises) for a reason.
But for the sake of historical accuracy, they are around since Windows 3.1,.

What I wanted to say is that if the OS would be running fast enough, there would be no race for better/faster CPU's, and then, of course, there would be no business, or at least much less business...

But look at the electronic music market. Software or hardware, it's the same. We could make great music with Cubase for the Atari, say Falcon. We could make great music with all the synthesizers and DAWs built until '2000 or so. Ok, I correct, until 2010

Most gear, analog, digital, biological, illogical, whatever, built until years ago, is still working, and up to a certain degree, you won't ever exceed the possibilities of a synthesizer. It creates waveforms, You play and mangle and mix them. The next model...does the same.

Nevertheless, the hardware and software market is thriving like never before. Monophonic subtractive hardware synths wherever you look. Polyphonic subtractive, FM, AM.... synthesis like we have for...40 years now, I think.
And once again, analog synths are expensive like rare gems...people listening to raw sawtooth demo samples via mp3 and laptop D/A converters, nodding wisely to their experience of the one truth, while calculating the loan rate for that 'monster', that they already own in several incarnations but got bored with.

With electronics for men it's like with shoes for women - you have never enough to fill your closet with them.

But, for what it's worth, that is what the business drives, so people can make a living. Some, more.