Windows 7 overtakes XP globally

[Preston]

Look's like it's finally happening. Glad to see the majority of windows users moving to a more secure, and faster operating system.

http://www.engadget.com/2011/10/15/windows-7-overtakes-xp-globally-vista-found-weeping-in-a-corner/

[silicon_toad2000]

lmao 'vista found weeping in a corner'

[GhostShip]

I dont believe theres enough data to support this claim given theres little information regarding any of the global locations and simply some yadda regarding how many sites they track activity on, given the many billions of internet users out there 3 millon undisclosed web sites is pretty much like saying we are basing our claims on less than a small percentage of the global amount, which is pretty ridiculous if you ask me.

http://gs.statcounter.com/faq#methodology

I would prefer stats like this came from MS but they have been known to fiddle the figures also.

[silicon_toad2000]

Statistics can be made to say anything
 95.6%  of all people polled know this.

[White Stripes]

too bad win7 cant be made to work comfortably in less than 3 gigs of ram and at least a dual core 2ghz or better... (win7 on netbook vs xp or linux ... hah!.. not to mention older desktops...)

win7... putting perfectly functional computer hardware in landfills since 2009... then ofc theres vista....

http://www.ubuntu.com/
http://www.reactos.com/

[Preston]

I dont believe theres enough data to support this claim given theres little information regarding any of the global locations and simply some yadda regarding how many sites they track activity on, given the many billions of internet users out there 3 millon undisclosed web sites is pretty much like saying we are basing our claims on less than a small percentage of the global amount, which is pretty ridiculous if you ask me.

http://gs.statcounter.com/faq#methodology

I would prefer stats like this came from MS but they have been known to fiddle the figures also.

You don't seem to understand the idea of sampling. Even if their sample is "only" 3 million websites, which I believe is a significant amount as they are probably on high traffic websites and not some personal webpage that only 5 people visit per day.

If the sampling amount indicates that this shift is happening in the browser usage, it's almost 100% likely that it reflects into a larger scale as well. It isn't wrong, it's just scaling.

[GhostShip]

Preston you dont seem to understand statistics 

Firstly nothing is 100% likely and the key words your looking for are "statistically significant values" , not simply someones views based on an unknown amount of variables that have no such statistical significance. If your able to find some methodology that includes more detailed data on just where their usage data comes from that may give this study some validity, however ascribing validity blindly is called faith and has nothing to do with statistics.

Its exactly the same as saying 3-5 ppl here equate to a trend across the whole WPN, that would  certainly not be a significant value and worse, it could be seen as misleading.

[Preston]

All statistics are useless then.

[silicon_toad2000]

All statistics aren't useless, but all statistics certainly aren't to be trusted without an understanding of the methodology behind them.

The randomness of the sample is far more important than the sample size.
To take ghostships example, a sample of 3-5 people here would not be random, they would all be readers of the wmw forum and so the sample would be skewed.

[Preston]

There have been multiple organizations that monitor this information, and they all indicate the same thing. It's even common knowledge that more people are moving away from xp and vista to 7...

[MinersLantern]

I went and got myself a present last Xmas. An Acer 'netbook' 2 gig RAM, 200G drive. Dual (actually quad) core ATOM (of all things) processor. 2 core cpu and 2 core graphics. It has win7 starter edition. I like. Its fast, I mean damn fast. Much faster at trancoding video and the like than my main tower by a factor of 4-5. I still entirely hate windows and its silly restore point BS. That hasnt been improved at all. It may or may not 'restore' the system. In fact, its just as likely to trash it worse than before. Always has been like that since XP. No matter once you turn the goofy thing off, split the drive into another partition dual boot with Knoppix. Then you simply Xerox the entire partition windows is on to the Linux one. If you break windows. Presto chango. You get it all back again in exact detail. Why cant Microsoft figure out how to do that? Otherwise i am impressed by even my crippled version of win7 starter. It is fast and doesnt crash or lockup. Winmx, robo, etc, etc. All that works just fine for me. 64 bit processor but 32 bit version of win7 though, maybe that is why I havent had the issues ive read from others trying to run this old software on a 64 bit windows.

[White Stripes]

there is no 4 core atom... there is a 2 core hyperthreaded version tho... which would appear as 4 cores in task manager...

im using an earlier version of the acer aspire netbook... 1.6gig single core (2 thread 32bit) atom 1gig ram and 160gig hdd.. (ram can be increased to max 2gig) .... possible to run xp without a pagefile if you play your cards right ... took me a while to find this model with xp cos the 'new' ones were already coming out.... only difference was the os....

[Bluey_412]

There are three kinds of lies:

Lies

Damned Lies

and Statistics!

                               (Attrib)    Abraham Lincoln