Users Who Think XP Is Good Enough Need to See Infection Rates Compared to Windows 7

In excess of 350 million licenses of Windows 7 were sold in the 18 months passed since the platform hit GA, the first 300 million of which by the end of January 2011, but despite being the second most used OS on the market, Windows Vista’s successor is doing a far superior job at protecting users compared to Windows XP.

According to operating system usage statistics from Net Applications there are largely two XP users for each customer running Windows 7.

Yet, according to the recently launched Security Intelligence Report volume 10 from Microsoft, the infection rates for Windows 7 are dwarfed by those of the decade old operating system launched in 2001.

“Infection rates for more recently released operating systems and service packs are consistently lower than earlier ones, for both client and server platforms. Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2, the most recently released Windows client and server versions, respectively, have the lowest infection rates,” the software giant stated.


Previous releases of SIR provided the same conclusions, but smaller market share could have been seen as contributing to lower Windows 7 infection rates.

But fact is that the uptake explosion for Windows 7 was not correlated with a similar increase in the volume of compromised computers.

The infection rate that Microsoft associates to Windows 7 in SIRv10 has been somewhat constant and remained under 4.0 since the end of 2009.

According to SIRv10, Windows 7 has an average quarterly infection rate of 2.5 for the 64-bit version and 3.8 for the 32-bit flavor, Vista SP2 is at 5.3 for x64 and 7.5 for x86 while XP is at 15.9 for x64 and 19.3 for x86.

“Infection rates for the 64-bit versions of Windows Vista and Windows 7 are lower than for the corresponding 32-bit versions of those operating systems. One reason may be that 64-bit versions of Windows still appeal to a more technically savvy audience than their 32-bit counterparts, despite increasing sales of 64-bit Windows versions among the general computing population,” the Redmond company said.

“Kernel Patch Protection (KPP), a feature of 64-bit versions of Windows that protects the kernel from unauthorized modification, may also contribute to the discrepancy by preventing certain types of malware from operating.”