Microsoft Windows Vista was released into retail on January 30, 2007, and there’s not been many nice words said about it since. It suffered from being incompatible with much of existing hardware and software, problems with drivers, imposing annoying security procedures on users, and more.

It seemed like everyone loved to hate poor Vista, enough to earn it a spot on the list of “Top ten terrible tech products.”

So today we can say happy fifth birthday to Windows Vista. But what does it look like around the world when it comes to the use of Vista? Is anyone still using the much-maligned OS?

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We could read the headline “Windows 7 just became the most widely used desktop OS in the world” earlier this year.

For Microsoft this must have been welcome news as it announced that Windows 7 for the first time ever was used on more computers to browse the web than Windows XP.

We know that Microsoft wants users to retire Windows XP, so does this spell out the doom for the aging OS, which went into retail sales ten years ago in 2001?

We pulled out the latest statistics to investigate and we found that Windows XP is still alive and well in large parts of the world.

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We’re all fans of cool screensavers here at Pingdom so we wanted to pick a few of our favorites and share them with you. A great screensaver is a good way to personalize your computer and to make a statement.

Digging deep through screensaver history we found these 10 that we find especially impressive.

Many of the screensavers below work with both Mac and Windows (and at least one with Linux too) but you should probably check the system requirements before downloading a particular screensaver. All the screensavers are free.

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In October, Windows 7 usage has for the first time surpassed Windows XP usage globally according to statistics from StatCounter. In other words, Windows 7 just became the most widely used desktop OS in the world.

This has been a long time coming. Windows XP has been at the top for eons (it launched 10 years ago, and once established, didn’t let go). Windows Vista never managed to threaten XP, so it wasn’t until Windows 7 came around that a shift really started to happen.

And that shift has happened fast. Windows 7 launched in October of 2009, then…

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We are in the middle of a new browser war, with Microsoft, Mozilla and Google all fighting for Web and HTML 5 supremacy. Ok, that was a bit dramatic, but there is some seriously intense competition going on right now.

With that in mind, you’d expect all three companies to do their utmost to get their latest and greatest web browsers on as many computers as possible. Google is doing that with Chrome. Mozilla is doing that with Firefox.

Microsoft is NOT doing that with Internet Explorer. Big emphasis on “not.”

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Internet Explorer 9 launched on March 14 this year, a full three months ago. It’s free software. It’s clearly a better web browser than previous IE versions. Yet only 13% of IE users have adopted IE9 so far. In other words, IE9 adoption is going… kinda slowly.

Compare that with the adoption of Firefox 4. It was launched on March 22, just over a week after IE9, yet 56% of Firefox users are already running Firefox 4. It’s been downloaded more than 200 million times and counting (the current count is 218 million).

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It’s finally happened. After a long reign at the top, Microsoft’s Windows XP is no longer the most widely used desktop operating system in the United States, instead turning the crown over to Windows 7.

As of April, Windows 7 has 31.71% of the desktop operating system market, compared to 31.56% for Windows XP.

Here is the current distribution of desktop operating systems in the United States, based on the first seven days of April.

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Pardon the wordplay on “dog-eat-dog world,” but as you’ll see it applies perfectly to what is going on with Windows in the desktop OS space.

Because there are several interesting things going on. Some quite expected, others not so much.

First of all, the situation now is that Windows 7 has made a real splash. It’s already passed Windows Vista and is getting closer and closer to that clunky old workhorse that refuses to die, Windows XP.

This is how the different versions of Windows were divided one year ago, versus now…

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From its official launch in October 2009, it took Windows 7 only nine months to pass Vista. Now the next question is when it will catch up with Windows XP. Because, unbelievable as it may seem, Windows XP still has a massive 55% of the desktop OS market. That is more than Windows 7 and Vista combined.

To figure out when Windows 7 will overtake XP, we have made a prediction based on the average market share changes over the past six months. It will give us an idea of what will happen if things continue at their current pace.

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Microsoft just announced that it has sold 150 million copies of Windows 7, and that the OS is selling at a pace of seven per second. Not bad for an OS that was launched just eight months ago.

At that pace, Windows 7 will rapidly be gaining market share. So how is it doing compared to its older siblings, Windows Vista and Windows XP?

Here’s a graph showing how the overall market shares for these three operating systems have changed over the last 12 months.

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