Windows Trends

I'm not sure how many people here have ever used http://www.pcpitstop.com/ to do a quick system scan and analysis.

They gather stats over time based on scans done. Of course there is no way to determine who the "sample" community might be. I suppose it would tend to lean toward early adaopters and those who think (obsess?) about their computers more than others.

But I thought one of their charts was interesting, showing adoption/usage rates of versions of Windows over the past few years.

My own interest stems from creating VB6 applications packaged for registration-free COM. One limitation is that this feature did not exist in Windows until XP, and was not really mature until XP SP2.

Combine that with an ability to rely on things like a decently-recent version of the VB6 runtimes, ADO, MSXML, and other core components being preinstalled... and it becomes very important to me how many people I might be turning away by releasing software that only runs on XP SP2 and later versions of Windows.

The chart that I was interested in is called "Operating System Waterfall." I wonder what other OS-population metrics might be available elsewhere highlighting Windows versions? Maybe web sites analyzing User-Agent strings?

http://techtalk.pcpitstop.com/welcom...harts-windows/

Stumbled over another set of interesting charts:

Over 10,000 CPUs Benchmarked

Nothing to take as absolute of course, all benchmarking is flawed. But interesting and potentially useful in broad terms for doing broad comparisons.

Makes me feel good about the Intel Q6600 system I bought last year for $399 (sans monitor) though, and in this economy I can enjoy some good news.