Here’s something that’s crept up on us at PC Pro towers: Windows 7 has overtaken Windows XP as the operating system most used by visitors to our website (click graph to enlarge).

The graph above runs from January 2008 until the end of last month – Windows 7 actually surpassed XP for the first time in December, we just hadn’t noticed it before (we’ve been busy, OK?).

The growth of Windows 7 has been quite extraordinary. In a little over 18 months, it’s gone from nowhere to the most used operating system. Compare that to Windows Vista, which didn’t even come close to toppling Windows XP, never getting any higher than 27% of the PC Pro audience.

It’s also worth noting the gradual incline of Mac OS X, which was used by 4.8% of our visitors at the beginning of 2008, and has since more than doubled that to 12.3% last month.

And what of Linux OSes? Our stats software only allows us to plot four trend lines at a time, hence the omission of Linux from the graph. Yet, it’s surpassed our Apple-flavoured friend in terms of growth, accounting for a mere 2.4% of visitors in January 2008, and 6.7% in February 2011.

That’s nigh on a fifth of the PC Pro readership using a non-Windows OS. Times really are changing.

Update at 5pm:

A couple of the commenters below asked for the figures on iOS and Android. It appears our regular stats software doesn’t discriminate between Mac OS X on the desktop and iPhone/iPad/iPods. Likewise, the Linux figure was indeed bolstered by Android users.

Google analytics provides a much more detailed breakdown of operating systems, although there’s a slight variation in the figures because of differences in the way the two analytics packages count users.

Here’s the top ten for visitors to PC Pro for February 2011, as provided by Google Analytics:

1. Windows 83.08%

2. Macintosh 7.31%

3. Linux 3.09%

4. iPhone 2.96%

5. Android 1.68%

6. iPad 0.91%

7. Unrecorded 0.51%

8. iPod 0.22%

9. BlackBerry 0.09%

10. Symbian 0.04%

With the arrival last month of Ubuntu 10.10 Netbook Edition, it’s time to revisit a familiar question: which operating system is best for a netbook? Linux-based systems may seem well-suited to lightweight devices (the original Asus Eee PC ran Xandros Linux), but there are advantages to the familiar interface and applications of Windows.

Indeed, if you buy a netbook today it will probably come with Windows 7 Starter, while older models are likely to be running Windows XP. Still, it’s easy to move from either to Ubuntu Netbook Edition, and of course it’s free. If you want to upgrade an older netbook to Windows 7 you’ll have to shell out £65 for the Home Premium edition, as Starter isn’t sold separately.

Each of these four operating systems has its attractions, but the key question is how each one performs on low-powered netbook hardware. To find the answer, I’ve spent the past few days installing them all – Windows XP Home, Windows 7 Starter, Windows 7 Home Premium and Ubuntu 10.10 Netbook Edition, with all available updates – on an Asus Eee PC 1008HA, and timing a series of typical netbook tasks to discover which OS makes the most of lightweight hardware.

Test 1: Starting up and suspending

Nobody wants to wait around for their netbook to start up, or to wake from sleep. Happily, suspend and resume worked perfectly on all four operating systems, so I was able to time how many seconds each took to sleep and resume from an idle desktop, along with boot times from cold.

As you can see, I tested Windows 7 Home Premium with both the Basic theme and the standard Aero theme. For this exercise it doesn’t make much difference, but I suspected it might on later tests.

Result: Windows 7 is slower to boot than XP or Ubuntu, and the Home Premium edition, with its full complement of services and features, is the slowest OS. However, most of the time we expect you’ll be resuming a netbook from sleep, and here it’s effectively a three-way tie, with XP only a few seconds slower than the rest.

Test 2: Opening applications

For this test I used the latest version of OpenOffice.Org on all platforms (with the “Quickstarter” disabled) and opened the applications by double-clicking on a .DOC file and a .XLS file that had been copied to the local desktop. I opened each file twice, to get a measure of how quickly the applications were able to launch both from cold and once cached.

Result: Windows XP was clearly the fastest OS at opening and reopening applications, while Windows 7 Home Premium did poorly, especially with Aero screen composition disabled. Interestingly, Windows 7 Starter scored a consistent second place, while Ubuntu failed to distinguish itself.

Test 3: Web performance

For this test I loaded a variety of JavaScript- and CSS-heavy web pages into the latest version of Google Chrome and used the browser’s built-in monitoring tool to time how long each one took to render.

Result: Given the timescales we’re dealing with (that Y axis is in seconds), this is essentially a draw, though enabling Aero seems to have a deleterious effect on Windows 7 Home Premium — strangely, the opposite to the effect observed in the applications test.

Test 4: Flash benchmark

To test Flash performance I used the free Flash Benchmark 2008 by Snails Animation, using the latest version of Flash available within Chrome. None of the platforms was able to get further than the medium-detail test. This graph measures frames per second, so taller bars are better.

Result: Aero seems to knock a few per cent off Flash performance, but it’s clearly Ubuntu that fares worst. Linux users have long grumbled about second-class Flash support, and these scores illustrate their point.

Test 5: Video performance

WMV and MPEG4 video files at resolutions up to 720p played perfectly well “out of the box” under all operating systems. However, none of the operating systems could cope with HD files from either YouTube or BBC iPlayer — in all cases the framerate dropped to only a few frames per second, making videos wholly unwatchable.

Result: Ubuntu’s poor Flash performance seems to drag it down in iPlayer: in windowed mode, video was slightly jerky, and in full screen mode it was too juddery to enjoy. The YouTube player seems to suit Ubuntu, though, while visiting the same site in Windows 7 caused videos to stutter too much for comfort.

Conclusion

There’s no reason not to give Ubuntu’s latest Netbook Edition a try — after all, it’s free, and it’ll run direct from a USB flash drive or coexist with your existing OS. The simple Unity interface is arguably better-suited to a basic netbook role than either the dated XP interface or the feature-rich Windows 7 front end.

For basic web and productivity tasks, Ubuntu’s performance appears no better than Windows, and for online video and games it’s distinctly worse. So while Ubuntu gains marks for openness and simplicity, there are still good reasons to hang on to Windows, at least until Adobe gets Flash up to speed.

If you’re currently running XP, though, it’s probably not worth paying for an upgrade to Windows 7 Home Premium: that OS isn’t designed for low-power devices, and it gave wayward performance in several of our tests. XP proved a stronger performer overall, and was the only OS to give a good experience across the iPlayer and YouTube tests. The interface is showing its age, but if that bothers you you can dual-boot Ubuntu and get the best of both worlds.

If, on the other hand, you’re shopping for a new netbook, Windows 7 Starter isn’t a bad deal. It’s not very customisable (for example, you can’t change the desktop wallpaper) and it doesn’t include any goodies such as Media Center or encryption tools; but its comparatively light weight lets it boot and open applications more quickly than Home Premium. Nor is Windows 7 as nippy as XP, but from an overall performance perspective the Starter edition’s as good as Ubuntu, and better with Flash content. By all means test-drive Ubuntu, but the truth is that no OS will magically turbo-charge your netbook.

At launch it cost £150 inc VAT, offering a massive £90 saving compared to 3 x £80 inc VAT for a standard upgrade. Street prices went even lower, down to around £120 inc VAT. So you could upgrade all three machines in your house for a tasty £40 each.

Two weeks ago I received an email from one of our readers, Daniel Cramer. “We, like many other families in the UK, have more than one computer in our household running on a Windows operating system,” he wrote. “We have three, including a laptop. Two run on XP and one, for our sins, on Vista.

“Now seemed an opportune moment to upgrade the OS for all three, so I tried to buy a Windows 7 Premium upgrade family pack. However, this is nowhere to be found, despite Amazon and others still listing it. My local PC World knew it was once available but did not know why they were unable to get any more stock.

“As the cost of upgrading the OS of the three computers virtually equals the cost of a new computer, with an Intel i3 processor and Windows 7 Home Premium as the OS, I do not think I will be upgrading soon.”

A sentiment, I suspect, echoed up and down the country. So I sent a speculative email asking Microsoft if there was any chance the Family Pack could make a reappearance, and why it only made them available for a limited amount of time in the first place?

(Family Pack officially stopped being promoted at the tail-end of 2009, but stocks carried on being sold into the early part of this year.)

The answer arrived today:

“When launched in the UK, the Windows 7 Family Pack was only available while supplies lasted,” explained Leila Martine, director, Windows Consumer Microsoft UK. “We’ll continue to explore ways of bringing value to our customers through compelling offers.”

Which is all fine and dandy, but here we are a year after launch without any more compelling offers being made. Perhaps they’ll come with the release of Service Pack 1, but frankly I won’t be holding my breath.

One of the new features in Windows 7 that barely ever warrants a mention these days is the revamped taskbar.

This is the first version of Windows that not only allows you to ‘pin’ your favourite applications/folders directly to the taskbar, but also to place them in whichever order you choose (at least, without downloading Tweak UI).

What effect has the new taskbar had on the way we interact with the Windows desktop? Have people stopped piling application shortcuts on to the desktop? Are taskbars overflowing with icons? Or is the ‘pin to taskbar’ feature simply ignored?

A survey of the desktops of the PC Pro team reveals it’s a combination of all three, with different members of the team deploying different taskbar tactics. Here are the three different types of taskbar psychology deployed in the PC Pro office.

THE MINIMALISTS

There are people, such as senior staff writer Mike Jennings, who simply refuse to pin anything to the taskbar. Instead, Mike’s decided to pin a dozen of his most frequently used programmes to the Start Menu. Which begs the question: why? “I don’t know,” said Mike, when asked to justify why he was the only member of the PC Pro team to operate with an icon-free taskbar. “It’s just the way I’ve always done it.” Proving habits are hard to break, even when new features arrive.

THE ESSENTIALISTS

The Essentialists are people like deputy editor David Fearon, laptops editor Sasha Muller, and technical editor Darien Graham-Smith, who only keep a handful of oft-used icons pinned to the taskbar. Day-to-day applications such as Outlook, Word and our default browser. Curiously, David Fearon is the only member of the PC Pro team who hasn’t got either Outlook or Word pinned to the taskbar. “They’re always open,” he said, “so why do I need them on the taskbar?”.

THE KITCHEN SINKERS

And then there are the members of the team who flood the taskbar with icons, pinning pretty much everything they’ve got installed on their machine to the foot of the desktop. Reviews editor Jonathan Bray has no fewer than 19 running along the foot of his screen, Tim Danton has 13 and David Bayon 11.

Jon’s got so many taskbar entries, he’s been forced to reduce the size of the icons to squeeze them all in. For him, it’s pretty much replaced the Start Menu for firing up programmes; on Windows Vista he would have typed the application’s name into the search bar.

Ordering

The Windows 7 taskbar gives you the option to drag and drop the icons into whichever order you choose. Yet, few people on the team actually bother. David Bayon says he groups different types of application together, with all the browsers alongside one another and all the Office apps in another batch.

It seems only I must have the applications lined up in a very specific order, with Outlook next to the Start button and the browser to its immediate right. If Outlook crashed in the days of Windows XP, I would have to shut down all my programs and load them all up again in the correct order, just so that Outlook was next to the Start button. But I’m weird like that.

Most popular programs

So which icons are most frequently pinned to the PC Pro team’s taskbars. Here’s our top ten:

1. Windows Explorer (7)

2 = Outlook (6)

2 = Word (6)

2 = Firefox (6)

5. Paint.Net (5)

6 = Excel (4)

6 = Windows Media Player (4)

6 = Custom PC Pro website database (4)

9 = Windows Calculator (3)

9 = Internet Explorer (3)

9 = Chrome (3)

So Windows Explorer wins unanimous support from everyone who actually bothers to use the taskbar. Internet Explorer and Windows Media Player are the other two apps pinned to the taskbar when you first install Windows, but the majority of the team have ditched both of those, with Firefox still by far and away the PC Pro browser of choice.

While the majority of those apps of course reflect our jobs as journalists (Word, Paint.Net and the PC Pro web database) perhaps the one surprise is the Windows Calculator down at number 9.

How do you use the taskbar? Let me know on comments below.

Very smoothly it went too. All the installed software was transferred flawlessly, all the files were migrated to the relevant destination, and the whole process took a little under two hours. Yes, the performance of the Windows 7 PC is probably a little slower than it would be with a clean install, but he’s 60 for Pete’s sake: it takes him 20 minutes to get up the stairs now, another 10 seconds on the boot time isn’t going to kill him.

We hit only one snag: the wireless dongle attached to his HP printer wasn’t being recognised by Windows 7. No problem, I thought. We’ll simply head off to HP’s website and download the relevant drivers.

First off, we had to download the drivers for the printer itself: all 289 sodding megabytes of them. How on Earth can a printer driver take up more than a quarter of a gig? Are they giving away a complete transcript of the internet with them or something? Anyway, the family pack of software downloaded smoothly and the printer was up and running.

Now for the wireless dongle.  A quick Google search took me to the page allegedly containing the Windows 7 drivers for the HP Wireless Printing Upgrade Kit. I urge you to take a look yourself, because what I found there left me flabbergasted.

Instead of pulling its finger out and writing a proper driver for its wireless dongle, HP has decided to use the Windows Vista one instead. Except, of course, the Windows Vista driver doesn’t work. And so HP walks its customers through a ridiculous procedure where they have to wait for the installation to crash, kill the process using Task Manager, and then rely on Windows 7’s Compatibility Assistant to reinstall the driver using the recommended settings.

I simply cannot believe that a company the size of HP would rather customers got their hands dirty with manually killing processes rather than write a nice friendly driver for a piece of kit that is meant to make printing easier, not harder.

Have you seen any worse “Windows 7 drivers”? Let me know on comments below.

It seems I’m far from the only person being blighted by this problem. Start typing “Windows 7 thumb…” into Google, and the first entry in the auto-suggestion list that appears under the search box is “Windows 7 thumbnails not showing”. Click through and you’ll find sites and forums swelling with complaints about vanishing thumbnails, in both Windows Vista and its bigger brother, 7.

One of those forums led me to what I thought was a blissfully simple solution: press F5 (in the same way as you refresh a browser screen) and the thumbnails suddenly reappear. Unfortunately, that proved only to be a temporary solution. The next time I went back into the folder, many of the thumbnails had scarpered again.

I simply can’t understand what’s causing this problem. The thumbnails file can’t be corrupted, as they instantly reload when I hit F5. And it’s not a problem with some images, as different thumbnails come and go each time. What’s more, it’s a local folder stored on my desktop, not one stored on the server, so there’s no issue with server lag.

I’ve checked on Microsoft’s Knowledge Base and it doesn’t appear to have an answer. So it’s over to you, the good readers of PC Pro. Rescue me from my thumbnail misery. I beg you.

First of all, I should make it clear that these machines don’t have an easy life. My laptop travels with me wherever I go, and they have a fair bit of punishment on a daily basis: slung into a laptop bag and down a hill on a bike; into London on the train; and then a 25-minute walk bumping up and down before I get into the office. And then all the way back at the end of the working day.

Nevertheless, for the past six years two ThinkPads have survived without incident for three years apiece. Until I installed Windows 7 RC on the latest one, and the hard disk died. It’s currently sitting in my desk-side drawer whilst I consider what to do with it.

The Dennis IT department sprang to the rescue, offering me a spare workaday laptop from their collection. The first one lasted for less than a month before its hard disk whimpered its way into obsolescence.

Once more, our trusty IT team gazed into their cupboard and fished out a replacement – the exact same model. This one kept going for less than a week.

I initially blamed the two successive failures on the ageing 1.8in hard disks they used, but my confidence has been shaken again today. On Friday, I set up a new system: a desktop PC at work, a netbook to take on my travels. Both of them running Windows 7 and synchronising vital data via the cloud.

The desktop is still working fine, but the netbook wouldn’t boot for my journey into work, with Windows 7’s startup repair system eventually declaring it irreparable. Then, bizarrely, when I plugged it in at work the netbook started to work again (and it still is).

So, the question: am I alone in this? Or is my growing paranoia about Windows 7 and hard disks entirely unfair, and more due to my maltreatment of laptops than my choice of OS? Perhaps, as Steve Cassidy keeps on telling me, it’s time to drop the mechanical hard disk entirely and move to SSDs.

There are a few signs here at TechEd that Microsoft wasn’t quite as sure about the runaway success of Windows 7 as its fanboys (me included).

In planning the layout of the show stalls in the exhibition halls, Microsoft has ensured plenty of space to gently introduce skeptics to its new hot product. You can wander up and furtle about with example machines, and if you stand there too long a Nice Person will come up and ask if you’ve seen this or that cool feature. I thought I was being even ruder than usual by brushing them off – then some Russian delegates popped up beside me and showed me how to do that brush-off thing properly.

Delegate goody bags come with the now traditional t-shirt, and hidden in the depths, an unassuming little Windows 7 DVD, marked “not for resale”. There are also several hundred breakout sessions on the many parts of Windows 7. I suppose it shows how long I’ve been using Windows 7 that I look at the Vista books in the MS tech publication bookstore as oddities, already.

The bias here is massively towards the corporate user base. There’s no ghetto of games developers looking for distribution, no home-software giants or industrial application gurus (though there is an MS stand showing Embedded Windows balancing a weighted pole on top of a feedback mount of sensors & motors – still trying to think of an actual use for that) .

The various hardware vendors have stands here – but their sizes in terms of square feet can catch you unawares. Ten people might just fit in the Lenovo stand; 150 on the Dell stand. Intel are here, mostly focussing on persuading developers to write multi-core friendly applications; and right across from it is the AMD stand, dominated by a PC with three monitors running Dirt 2 replays.

I’m still trying to work out what motivates the dozen network and asset management utility providers to establish medium-sized stands here, when they are surrounded by delegates moving between that many seminars on the Microsoft SystemCenter product which, for most corporates, will render their efforts irrelevant.

I am also feeling deeply hurt at the “world fails to catch up” problem over personal identity: only one stand here is offering credit-card style SmartCard makers, readers and writers. I want physical security – a secure key, a SmartCard (but not fingerprints, please)  for my personal login. Where is the MS Mouse with biometric recognition or a smartcard slot built in? It might be a long time coming, judging by this show.

In the latest part of our bid to convert a Mac user to Windows 7, Chris Brennan compares Finder to Explorer and wonders what all the fuss is about

The Finder on the Mac seems much maligned by many Windows users and I have to admit I’m not sure why. Since using Windows 7 I’ve found the methods of storing and finding files much the same. The Finder and Explorer windows look strikingly similar and can be viewed in much the same way.

After using the Windows Explorer I’m not really convinced it’s necessarily better than the Finder, but as I’ve already said that may well be because I’m more used to the Mac way of doing things. I have to admit that the smart folders of OSX are a much better solution than libraries in Windows 7. Unless I’m missing something (and there’s a rather large chance I am) they’re not as flexible.

I have a smart folder on my Mac desktop that has all the .jpg files I’ve opened in the last month and one that has all the PDF files with Invoice in the name that are created between April 2009 and 2010. As far as I can tell I can’t have a library that does the same. If I’m wrong I’m sure you’ll point it out in the comments.

The search box in Windows Explorer also seems much slower than the results provided by the search box in the Start Menu, which doesn’t seem right. For instance, if I go to the Start Menu and type editor@pcpro I get all the most recent emails I’ve sent to Tim and documents that contain that address almost instantaneously, If I do the same with the search box in Windows Explorer the search takes much longer. The two search boxes should surely be equal surely?

There are some elements of Windows 7 that really don’t make any sense to me at all. The control panel window in my setup at least, has 51 separate entries. A couple of those are for installations I’ve performed: QuickTime and MobileMe. However, that still makes for a window that has 49 items.

Obviously, Microsoft has thought about this and come up with the category view, but  I’m not sure it truly makes things clearer for the user. There’s inconsistency too, when you click any of the control panel items – some open a new window, some take you forward like a browser would and finally some take you to a different style of window altogether.

I also received a number of ‘The page failed to load’ errors when clicking the various control panels. This, I’m going to guess isn’t indicative of normal service, but it hasn’t made my experience in this area a particularly positive one.

I’d be the first to say that my problems with Explorer are mostly trivial rather than serious concerns, but the deeper I go into the Windows system the more I find that feels odd to me. Perhaps, I’ve become so ingrained to the Mac way of doing things that I’ve grown accustomed to the inconsistencies of that OS, but that doesn’t mean that Windows 7 doesn’t have its share of weird and not so wonderful design flaws.

Click here to read the rest of Chris Brennan’s blog on converting from Mac to Windows 7

From a marketing point of view, it’s an obvious message for Dixons to be pushing. But in reality, as we all know, one of the great merits of Windows 7 is that most of us don’t need a new PC to run it. I use it happily on an old Advent laptop with 1GB of RAM and a Pentium Dual-Core processor; David Bayon runs it on his Atom-powered Samsung NC10 netbook. If there was ever an edition of Windows that didn’t mean “time for a new PC”, this is it.

With Microsoft getting so much right in Windows 7, it’s a disappointment to see it permitting (perhaps even supporting) such a misleading marketing slogan. And I think it’s a mistake. In the coming years Windows is going to be increasingly threatened from multiple directions — by a buoyant Apple, by emergent operating systems such as Chrome OS and by cloud-based mobile computing. Surely as the battle grows Microsoft will want its best foot forward, in the shape of a satisfied user base. The last thing it will want is to be weighed down by still-lingering resentments over Vista.

Yet this slogan seems designed to deliver precisely that outcome. Dissatisfied customers won’t appreciate being told they must write off their old PC to escape their unsatisfactory OS. Many who can’t afford a new PC will stick with Vista and remain disgruntled with it. And those who know the truth – that any machine that runs Vista will run Windows 7 better – will resent Microsoft’s apparent collusion in an attempt to get them to waste money on an unnecessary new PC.