Every few months or so, Valve Software releases a survey through their broadband delivery service, Steam, that polls user hardware.
The results of their latest survey have been compiled — over 390,000 users participated in the survey and for statistic freaks (like me); these numbers can give you a good idea of what’s hot in the hardware world.
How has Windows Vista fared? According to the results, only 5% of the users are using Vista, while 92% are still using Windows XP.
While this statistic clearly show that users still prefer XP over Vista, this doesn’t mean that Vista "failed."
Considering that Valve hasn’t really upped the ante on supporting/requiring Vista for their games, many users simply didn’t want to upgrade yet.
Other considerations include waiting for further Vista support, compatibility with Valve games or just being hesitant in trying out Vista. Give it time and Vista will mature out.
Other neat statistics indicate that well over 47% of users still use between 512 MB to 999 MB of RAM.
The battle between CPU brands has Intel at 51% and AMD at 49%. A staggering 54% prefer NVIDIA video cards while 35% prefer ATI video cards (like me).
The most popular video card is the NVIDIA GeForce 6600 at 7.8%. 41% have their resolution set at 1280×800 while 37% have their resolution at 1024×768.
76% use microphones, 58% speak English. 24% have hard drive space that is over 250 GB (very surprising) — and my puny 80 GB hard drive is used by 0.46% of all users surveyed.
