Windows 11 Adoption Is Lower Than Windows XP, Survey Claims

A new survey claims Windows 11 adoption is so low it’s actually less popular than the 20-year-old Windows XP. 

The survey comes from an IT management provider called Lansweeper. Through its own software products, the company scanned 10 million Windows devices this month to determine which OS they were using. 

The results found that only 1.44% of the devices had Windows 11 installed, which is lower than the 1.71% for Windows XP. In contrast, Windows 10 maintains a dominant share at 80.34%. 

Although Windows 11’s adoption is low at 1.44%, the number actually went up almost three times from 0.52% back in January.

It’s also important to note that other surveys have found much higher Windows 11 adoption numbers. Last month, the app advertising platform AdDuplex found Windows 11 usage was at 19.4%, although this represented a mere 0.1% growth from the previous month. Meanwhile, the Steam hardware survey from Valve estimates Windows 11 usage has reached 16.8%. 

Lansweeper said its own survey comprises 20% enterprise systems and another 80% from consumer machines through polling done by the company’s Fing network security scanner product.  All the data from the survey was collected “from aggregated, anonymized data points,” with user consent, the company added. 

Lansweeper suspects one reason why Windows 11 adoption is so low is due to the hardware requirements for the OS. The Windows 11 free upgrade is only officially arriving for PCs that are, at most, four to five years old. The machines must also come built with a security feature called Trusted Platform Module (TPM), although you can install Windows 11 manually on many unsupported systems.

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Lansweeper noted its previous survey of 30 million Windows devices at businesses found that only about 45% were eligible for the free Windows 11 upgrade.  

“Many organizations have been put off from having to buy new machines that meet these conditions, while others are simply happy with the current existence of Windows 10 which continues to be supported until 2025,” said Lansweeper’s Chief Strategy Officer Roel Decneut in a statement. “This situation will likely continue in the future unless businesses are given a compelling reason to upgrade.”

Microsoft did not immediately respond to a request for comment. But in January, the company signaled that all remaining eligible Windows PCs should be receiving the option to install Windows 11 soon.

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