Windows 7 now the most used OS on campus

It’s been a while since I did these stats, and I don’t think I’ve ever blogged them before, but I was prompted to check this after hearing Microsoft say that Windows 7 has overtaken previous versions worldwide.

It turns out that even though there hasn’t been any particular institutional drive towards Windows 7, thanks to the efforts of pro-active staff across the University, it does now significantly outnumber all other operating systems in our Active Directory combined! In the last 3 months, the breakdown of computers is…

Windows 7: 7155
Everything else: 5385

There are an unknown number of machines that aren’t connected to Active Directory, but the spread of those won’t affect this a great deal.

Another interesting stat that I heard recently came from Dell. They now predict that 50% of all server workloads are virtualised. Thats probably about true here – I’ll see if I can get those stats later.

Incidentally, the breakdown of Windows servers in our AD sees roughly equal numbers of Server 2008 R2 and Server 2003 (just over 200 of each), and just over a hundred running Server 2008.

If anyone is interested in grabbing these stats in their own organisation (or OU), then it’s just a simple bit of PowerShell using the Quest AD cmdlets

$computerObjects = Get-QADComputer `
-IncludedProperties pwdLastSet -SizeLimit 0
$recentComputers = $computerObjects | `
Where {$_.pwdLastSet -ge ((Get-Date).AddDays(-90))}
$recentComputers | Group OSName | `
Sort Count -Desc | Format-Table Count,Name -AutoSize

(That’s just 3 lines of code, but it could be fewer. The ` character extends the line in PowerShell)

2 thoughts on “Windows 7 now the most used OS on campus

  1. Very misleading title! I disagree that the unknown number of non-Ad objects won’t influence things much. What’s the ratio between #ad objects and # objects in net reg? The vast majority of mac or linux systems will not be in the ad. 1/3 of cs professoriat use macs. Has anyone surveyed any other schools?

  2. Well it won’t influence the statement in the title because there isn’t going to be more than 7000 of any one version of MacOS or Linux.

    If that is the case, the soon-to-be-published review is going to be interesting!

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