It is normal to see such data move +/-1% in a few months time. It is far more shocking to see 18% windows users in China are still running their XP. Must be very easy for NSA to do their job.

The elephant in the room is that XP was the last version of Windows that was relatively trivial to pirate. Activation procedures got stricter from 2008 onwards.

What makes you think that? Win 7 is simple to activate using Daz loader etc. my theory is that Win XP is the last version of Windows that will run comfortably on true toaster <1GB RAM computers.

See, I would have said that with Windows 2000. It came out only two years earlier and was pretty similar. I definitely am still holding on to my install cds.

Then you really don't want to see South America... a few years ago every PC I saw at a business ran XP.

When I visited a firm we had contracted out with in India they also had machines running xp right next to machines running Windows 10 for our project