Nerds love to know how other nerds use their PCs. To give you a glimpse of what your fellow nerds are doing, Microsoft has released some (anonymous, but revealing) details about Windows users gleaned from the company’s Windows Feedback Program. The goal is to use the data to improve the coming Windows 7, but the figures reveal some interesting facts on their own.
Judging by the graphic above, images are overwhelmingly the most common file on your average Windows machine. However, the chart above is perhaps most notable for what it doesn’t show — music and video files. In fact, other than a passing mention of HD video, Microsoft never even acknowledges media files in the stats.
The other thing that jumps out from these statistics is that I’m not alone in my dislike of the “My Pictures†folder. It’s hard to tell exactly how many of us dislike “My Pictures,†but clearly we’re in the majority — spaces in folder names are bad, mkay?
But interesting trivia aside, the real goal is to improve Windows 7 and in that case the far more revealing statistic is that the vast majority of users with high screen resolution displays (1600×1200 or better) are adjusting their resolution down to 1024×768. Why pay for the pixels if you aren’t going to use them?
The Windows 7 blog admits that the loss of fidelity at higher resolutions makes “reading text in editors and web browsers difficult.†The post promises that in the near future “the Windows Desktop Graphics team will describe what we have done with that information to improve display quality and reading comfort in Windows 7.â€
We’ll be sure to let you know when the graphics team offers their insights.
See Also:
- Windows 7 Struggles to Balance Performance and New Features
- New Microsoft Blog Promises Windows 7 Details
- Sneak Peak: A Look At What Could Be In Store For Windows 7