Poll: Why are you still using Windows 7?

ed bott

Here's how you can still get a free Windows 10 upgrade

The GWX tool may be gone, but all the other upgrade tools still work, and the end result is an apparently valid digital license. But those offers could end soon.

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Update: The poll is now closed. Here are the results.

Statistically speaking, one in 11 people reading this post on a PC are running Windows 7. That's not speculation or guesswork. That's what the ZDNet server logs for the last 90 days say. Some 85.8% of the many millions of PC-based visitors to this site are running Windows 10. Of the remainder, 9.2% are running Windows 7, which is twice as many as the Windows 8/8.1 population.

That data lines up pretty closely to public data from the United States Government's massive Digital Analytics Program, which measures visits to more than 400 websites run by the Federal Government. Over the same three-month period, their mix of traffic from PCs consisted of 85.9% Windows 10, 10.0% Windows 7, and 3.7% Windows 8.x.

That's a fairly significant drop from the last snapshot I looked at, which counted Windows 7's share of visitors at 18.9% in the 90 days leading up to that operating system's January 14, 2020 end of support deadline. (See "It's 2020: How many PCs are still running Windows 7?")

The glass-half-full crowd says it's a good thing that half the population has stopped using Windows 7 in the nine months since Microsoft ended support for it. But I'm curious why so many are continuing to use Windows 7 past its expiration date.

Rather than speculate, I put together a poll. Thanks to the more than 3,200 people who responded. I'll share the results next week.