About 184 million commercial PCs – in small- and mid-sized businesses, in large enterprises and in government agencies – are still running the quickly aging Windows 7, according to Microsoft.

That number included all markets except for China, the company said, with the largest percentage – one in four PCs, or approximately 46 million – in the U.S.

(Microsoft’s number is just a fraction of the latest estimates of Windows 7’s pervasiveness calculated by Computerworld using share data; that calculation pegged Windows 7 global consumer and commercial footprint at around 709 million PCs. The commercial side of that 709 million would be approximately 390 million using the long-accepted 55%-45% ratio of commercial/consumer PCs. Yet even that reduced number would be more than twice Microsoft’s mark, leaving one to wonder if China had more than 200 million Windows 7 PCs, or if Computerworld‘s figure was out in left field. Presumably, Microsoft’s number is the most accurate, as it was based on machine-to-Microsoft telemetry.)

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