Vista up, XP down in latest community snapshot

The tide may be beginning to turn for Vista. In our latest snapshot of the Windows Sentinel community, Microsoft’s much-maligned OS (all flavors) shows up on ~31% of sampled systems – a gain of nearly 12 percentage points versus our previous sample earlier in Q2.

At the same time, Windows XP (all flavors) dropped 10 percentage points, from 74% to 64% of sampled systems. Among XP users, ~42% have deployed Service Pack 2, up 8 points from early Q2, while Vista users are deploying SP1 at a rate of 83%, up from 66% in our last snapshot.

    Figure 1 – Vista Adoption is Climbing Among Sentinel Users  

These results were taken from our nearly 3000 strong community of contributing Windows-based desktops and servers. Other interesting tidbits:

• Dual-core CPUs are now the dominant choice among Windows users, with 57% of systems reporting at least 2 CPU cores – up from 43% just a few months ago. This bodes well for Microsoft since a major barrier to entry with Vista has been the need for more than one CPU core to achieve adequate performance. With two cores on the majority of systems, the company can begin to focus in earnest on optimizing its software for parallelism.

• Quad-core penetration is expanding, albeit more slowly. Roughly 8% of sampled systems reported more than 2 cores, up from 6% in our previous sample set. For now, these chips remain a luxury in the desktop market, though this will likely change as Intel ramps-up its next generation CPU production later this year (most of Intel’s forthcoming chip designs feature 4 or more discrete CPU cores).

• Memory configurations are also expanding. Some 65% of sampled systems reported 2GB or more of RAM, up 7% from our previous snapshot. Again, this bodes well for Microsoft since 2GB is now recognized as the “sweet spot” for 32-bit versions of Vista. And with 29% of systems reporting over 2GB of memory, the effects of a reported switch by Vista adopters to the 64-bit version of Vista are now being felt in the hardware space as users buy more memory to feed the x64 beast.

Of course, the real winner in all of this will be Windows 7. As we’ve noted in the past, Microsoft has always had Moore’s Law on its side. It was only with Vista that its penchant for code bloat significantly outpaced the hardware’s ability to sop up the overages. Now, with a majority of the installed base capable of running Vista with adequate performance, the door is wide-open for a similarly-spec’d follow on OS to sweep the industry and help Microsoft close the book on its pre-Vista Windows history.