Windows 11 is more popular with gamers, but there’s bad news for Intel in Steam survey

Windows 11 is gaining some decent momentum with gamers, at least going by the latest stats from Steam, although Intel has slipped slightly compared to last month’s Steam survey.

The hardware and software survey for January 2022 showed that Windows 11 is now used in 13.56% of the gaming rigs evaluated for this report, which is up quite strongly on December’s figure of 10.15%.

That’s good news for Microsoft, of course, but the survey produced somewhat disappointing results for Intel on the hardware front.

In December’s stats, Intel actually witnessed an increase in its processor market share among Steam gamers to the tune of 0.82%, with Team Blue securing 69.27% in total.

That looked significant given how dominant rival AMD Ryzen processors have been in recent times, stealing a lot of turf from Intel in the desktop PC world – but the upward movement has ebbed for Team Blue, as it dropped slightly to 69.02% in January 2022, albeit that only represents the loss of a quarter of a percentage point.


Analysis: Nothing too worrying for Intel, and serious momentum building for Microsoft

With the Intel figures, while the chip giant might be slightly disappointed that growth hasn’t continued – and that new Alder Lake CPUs aren’t sparking a continued upswing – it’s not a huge surprise.

This is only a very slight loss for Intel, after all, and in recent times, the figures for Team Blue have been rather up and down anyway (even before Alder Lake came out, we saw some decent upticks with Rocket Lake). Really, this is a pretty minimal downward dip, and could be put down to the typical margin of error that Valve’s survey is doubtless working with.

Windows 11’s progress is a more clearly defined growth spurt, and with an increase of 3.41% for January 2022, that’s almost double the gain Windows 11 witnessed from November to December (1.87%).

In short, there’s a clear suggestion that more and more gamers are making the move to Microsoft’s newest OS, despite the early bugs which we’ve written multiple reports about (mind you, some of these are now fixed up, and it’s not like Windows 10 doesn’t have bugs either).

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Barely anyone has upgraded to Windows 11, survey claims

It's now been over a month since Microsoft released the latest version of Windows but a new survey suggests less than one percent of PC users have upgraded to Windows 11.

According to new research from the IT asset management firm Lansweeper, just 0.21 percent of PC users are currently running Windows 11 despite the fact that it is available as a free update for Windows 10 users.

The company's recent investigation used data from more than 10m Windows devices running on business and home networks to find that Windows 11 is the fifth most popular Windows operating system. In fact, more PCs are running Windows XP (3.62%) and even Windows 8 (0.95%) than are running Windows 11.

One of the reasons could be due to Microsoft's TPM requirements as many systems lack the necessary hardware to run Windows 11.

End of Life operating systems

Lansweeper's report also shows that almost 1 in 10 (9.93%) of the Windows devices it scanned are running End of Life operating systems including Windows XP and Windows 7 which Microsoft stopped supporting back in 2014 and 202 respectively.

Chief marketing officer at Lansweeper, Roel Decneut provided further insight on the dangers and security risk of running End of Life operating systems in a press release, saying:

“The situation poses a significant cybersecurity risk as Microsoft no longer provides bug-fixes or security patches for Windows Vista, 2000, XP, and 7. Although the majority of users are on newer operating systems, the billions of active Windows devices worldwide means there could still be millions of people using devices that are insecure and open to attack. Plus, a large number of these outdated systems are predicted to be running on enterprise devices, which means it’s not just personal information that’s on the line.” 

While some individuals and businesses may not be ready to upgrade to Windows 11 just yet, running an older version of Windows that is no longer receiving security updates from Microsoft can put your PC at a much higher risk of falling victim to malware and other cyberattacks.

Looking to upgrade your systems for Windows 11? Check out our roundup of the best business computers as well as our lists of the best business laptopsbest workstations and best mobile workstations

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