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How can you kill that which will not die? Windows XP is back (sorta... OK, not really)

Usage up 0.08% while Windows 10 continues to win converts

Windows 10 adoption keeps rising and Windows 8 usage continues to fall, StatCounter confirmed in its latest monthly worldwide traffic sniff to discern who's using which desktop operating system.

Collectively, Microsoft's OSes are used by 84.48 per cent of the market; OS X took 11.3 per cent; Linux 1.79 per cent; Chrome OS 0.46 per cent; and "unknown" OSes are run by 1.97 per cent of users. Poor old FreeBSD nabbed 0 per cent of that tracked desktop traffic, though we can confidently state that while it is loved by the few, they are good sorts.

Let's drill down into Microsoft's 84.48 per cent. Out of all tracked Windows operating systems, Windows 10 had its share rise a tad to 36.93 per cent in July from 36.6 per cent the month before. Windows 8 has slipped from 2.4 to 2.32 per cent and Windows 8.1 fell from 9.37 to 9.14 per cent. Windows 7 and Vista slipped as well.

Ranjit Atwal at Gartner told The Register that although these numbers reflect a marginal rise-and-fall effect, it's significant (in a statistical sense) because it's been happening for a while now.

There was a tiny hiccup if you ninja the numbers. Windows XP crawled up to 4.94 per cent for July from 4.86 in June.

StatCounter's data for the past 12 months shows XP has been in decline. A bump last occurred in December, when share went up to 5.93 from 5.92 in November – so you might be encouraged to say XP is making a comeback.

But, as Atwal says, the change is so tiny (and this isn't a long-term trend) that it's likely just a side-effect of StatCounter using different samples to track traffic.

Anyway, it ain't going anywhere, it seems.

Windows 98 and Windows 2000 remained the same at .01 per cent. ®

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