'Real-World' Stats: Only 30% of PCs Running Vista

Ever wonder how poorly Windows Vista fared after reading all the bad press since its launch? Real-world PC usage data from the exo.performance.network (EPN) suggests just how much of a flop Windows Vista has been for Microsoft.

Despite Microsoft's claims about Windows Vista's deployment, PC sales were counted as Windows Vista sales by Microsoft, despite the fact that many users and enterprises were 'downgrading' to Windows XP.

In fact, two years after Vista's release, not even 30 per cent of PCs are actually running it. (Source: infoworld.com)

Those that are running Vista are almost exclusively using the Home Premium version that wasn't eligible for the Windows XP downgrade. It's suggested that Vista is mainly used by home users who had no option but to use the version of Vista that came preinstalled on a new PC. (Source: infoworld.com)

Windows Sentinel Tool Tracks PC Usage

Data was compiled by EPN, a real-time, community-based monitoring tool (available via InfoWorld.com) which receives data from about 10,000 PCs throughout the world, 25 per cent of which exist in larger business environments.

The tool tracks what PCs people are actually using, their specific configurations, applications being run by the PCs, and so on. Data is 'anonymized' to keep personal information private, then aggregated to produce a variety of reports on what PC owners are doing. (Source: infoworld.com)

IE, Office 2007 Usage Strong in the Workplace

Internet Explorer's hidden stronghold in the enterprise workplace was among other surprise findings from EPN. While the public use of IE has dwindled, 85 per cent of enterprise Windows users run IE for at least 4 hours a day -- possibly because their applications require IE.

Office 2007 dominates enterprise Windows users. Nearly 35 per cent of Windows PCs now run some variant of Office 2007. Open Office is making an impact, however; nearly 13 per cent of PCs were running the open source office suite.

Multi-Core PCs now the Norm

Windows 7 requires the same resource requirements that Windows Vista did. The data compiled by EPN reveals that systems running 2GB to 3GB of RAM are now the norm and multi-core CPUs are present in nearly 60 per cent of all PCs.

Intel still dominates the base of PCs for CPUs, running in 71 per cent of the PCs monitored. (Source: infoworld.com)

Graphs available via InfoWorld:

http://www.infoworld.com/windows-pulse?source=editinline

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