When Is Support For Windows 7 Ending

With a heartfelt nod to Monty Python, Windows seven would like you all to know that it'southward not expressionless yet.

A twelvemonth subsequently Microsoft officially concluded support for its long-running Bone, 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 essentially in the past year.

On the eve of Microsoft'south Windows vii stop-of-support milestone, I consulted some analytics experts and calculated that the owners of roughly 200 million PCs worldwide would ignore that deadline and proceed running their preferred Bone. That was, admittedly, a rough estimate. (If you want to do the math yourself, read my year-ago mail, "It's 2020: How many PCs are still running Windows seven?")

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 consequent story.

Permit's start with the Us Government Digital Analytics Program, which reports a running, unfiltered full of visitors to U.S. websites over the previous xc days. One of the datasets includes a report of visits from all PCs running any version of Windows, which makes it an platonic proxy for this question.

At the end of December 2019, 75.viii% of those PCs were running Windows 10, 18.9% were still on Windows 7, and a mere iv.6% were sticking with the unloved Windows 8.ten.

A year afterwards, as Dec 2020 draws to a close, the proportion of PCs running Windows 10 has gone upward 12%, to 87.8%; the Windows 7 count has dropped by more than 10 points, to eight.five%, and the population of Windows viii.x holdouts has shrunk even further, to a minuscule three.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 agone were on the marking, that means more than than 100 one thousand thousand Windows PC were retired, recycled, or upgraded in the by 12 months.

Other metrics tell a nearly identical story.

At NetMarketShare, for example, the numbers at the stop of 2020 evidence Windows 10 usage upward 11 points, from 63.0% to 74.0%, while Windows vii usage dropped 9.5 points, from 31.two% to 21.seven%.

As well, StatCounter Global Stats showed the number of PCs running Windows x 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'south clear that at least 100 1000000 PCs are withal running Windows vii, and that number could be significantly college.

Some of those holdouts are paying Microsoft for the privilege of receiving security updates, although it's non clear how many are part of the Extended Security Update program. And those customers volition face more pressure to upgrade in 2021 every bit the price of those updates is fix to double.