It was at the start of 2020 that Microsoft officially ended support for its Windows 7 operating system, and aggressively wanted users to use Windows 10.
One year later, at the start of 2021, millions of PCs are still running the unsupported system.
In a report from ZDNet, the United States Government Digital Analytics Program, which reports a running, unfiltered total of visitors to U.S. websites over the previous 90 days, had datasets that includes a report of visits from all PCs running any version of Windows.
At the end of December 2019, 75.8% of those visitors' PCs were running Windows 10, 18.9% were still on Windows 7, and 4.6% were using Windows 8.
In December 2020, visitors using Windows 10 PCs have gone up 12%, to 87.8%; while visitors using Windows 7 PCs have dropped by more than 10 points, to 8.5%, and those who use Windows 8 PCs have shrunk to 3.4%.
And those using Windows XP, the once was the most popular operating system ever, "is now nearly invisible, with its device count adding up to a fraction of a rounding error."
The report also include other metrics.
From NetMarketShare, for example, the numbers at the end of 2020 show Windows 10 usage up 11 points, from 63.0% to 74.0%, while Windows 7 usage dropped 9.5 points, from 31.2% to 21.7%. Similar was shown on StatCounter Global Stats, where the number of PCs running Windows 10 increased more than 12%, 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," the report said.
"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."
In the report, it was concluded that more than 100 million Windows PC were retired, recycled, or upgraded in the past 12 months, and "at least 100 million PCs are still running Windows 7, and that number could be significantly higher."
According to Microsoft on its Windows 7 end of life support page:
Windows 7 is an operating system, released as part of the Windows NT family of operating systems. It was released to manufacturing on July 2009, and became generally available on October 22, 2009.
As the successor of Windows Vista, Windows 7 was Microsoft's flagship operating system for use on PCs on home computers, business desktop, laptops, tablets, and media center PCs, until it was succeeded by Windows 8 in 2012.
The last supported version of Windows 7 was released on July 1, 2011, entitled Windows Embedded POSReady 7. On January 12, 2016 Microsoft ended support for Internet Explorer versions prior to Internet Explorer 11 on Windows 7, and later, the Extended support for Windows 7 ended on January 14, 2020, over ten years after the release of Windows 7.
It should be noted that those people who are still using Windows 7 in 2020 and early 2021 are mostly those who pay Microsoft for the privilege of receiving security updates, although it's not clear how many of them are part of the Extended Security Update program.
