Considerably more businesses running Windows 7 than Windows 11

After Microsoft launched Windows 10 back in 2015 it devoted a lot of time and resources to -- shall we say -- 'encouraging' people and businesses to make the switch from Windows 7, even kindly going as far as to automatically upgrading their systems for them.

Things are very different with Windows 11 as Microsoft is happy for the new OS to coexist alongside its predecessor, for the time being at least. There is a downside to this approach however, as it means there’s not the rush to upgrade that Microsoft will have been hoping for, to the point where significantly more businesses are running Windows 7 than Windows 11, despite the former having reached end of life ages ago.

According to the latest findings from Lansweeper, some 42 percent of workstations are incapable of being upgraded to Windows 11 due to Microsoft’s more stringent upgrade requirements based on CPU, RAM and TPM.

The data, which was compiled from an estimated 30 million Windows devices from 60,000 organizations, found that on average, only 57.26 percent of workstations were eligible to receive the automatic upgrade to Windows 11.

According to the company:

Specifically, only 57.26 percent of CPUs for workstations tested met the system requirements for upgrading to Windows 11, while 42.74 percent did not. And while the majority passed the RAM test (92.85 percent), about 65 percent of the workstation TPMs tested met the requirements, while over 15 percent failed and 20 percent was not TPM compatible or did not have it enabled.

In addition, Lansweeper looked into Windows 11 adoption rates and found that only 2.61 percent of firms have so far made the switch to Windows 11, an increase of just 1.17 percent since April 2022.

To put that into context, it means Windows 11 is now more popular than both Windows XP (1.27 percent) and Windows 8.x (1.52 percent) but it still lags way behind Windows 7 (3.38 percent).

You can view the full OS breakdown in the infographic below.

Photo credit: BlueSkyImage / Shutterstock