Windows 8

Although Windows 8 has been steadily increasing its share of the market over the past few months, a recent surge by Windows 7 has put the old OS back on top, at least temporarily. The most recent data from Net Applications shows that Windows 8 is up 0.61% from last month, which means Microsoft’s new operating system is on 8.02% of machines hitting the company’s network, but the Windows 7 adoption rate increased at a rate of 0.80%, bringing it up to 46.43% of the market. Windows XP continues to fall off the charts, dropping from 33.66% to 31.41%, though it is worth noting this is a slightly less precipitous drop than last month’s. Perhaps the release of Windows 8.1 and the retooled Start button will bring users around to the new OS as the year ends.

The “blue screen of death” that signifies a system failure has historically characterized Microsoft’s Windows operating system as much as the windows-based user interface itself. Seeing the dreaded “BSOD” meant you had undoubtedly just lost whatever work was being done at the time, and a reboot was the only way out. Catastrophic failures that brought on the BSOD used to be fairly regular occurrences in Windows, however the dreaded blue screen has made itself much more scarce in recent years. According to a recent report from ZDNet, this is a direct result of Microsoft’s hard work to identify the various causes of these system crashes and stamp them out. More →

Microsoft’s bet that people would come around to Windows 8 once they got to experience it on touch-based PCs hasn’t gone well so far. Computerworld reports that research firm IDC will “likely” drop its estimates on touch PC shipments from 17% to 18% of all laptops shipped in 2013 to between 10% and 15% of all laptops. IDC analyst Bob O’Donnell tells Computerworld that high prices on touch-based notebooks are big reason why touch-centric PCs haven’t taken off yet this year. More →