Nothing slow about Windows 10 adoption as it blazes past 200 million installs

sincity · December 30, 2015

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Apparently the number of Windows 10 installations out there has increased far more than was previously thought in the last couple of months, at least according to the rumour mill.

Word has come from sources who spoke to WinBeta, claiming that Windows 10 has now been installed on over 200 million devices across the globe (note that this is devices, so not just desktop PCs).

Of course, this is just speculation and not an official figure, and it represents a big jump since Microsoft's last announcement of 110 million installs back in October.

Indeed, at the end of October, WinBeta's inside contacts claimed the number of Windows 10 installations had increased to 120 million – meaning an increase of around 10 million in just under a month.

That doesn't quite tally with a leap of 80 million in two further months – and neither does it match up with what bean counting firms such as StatCounter have been saying about Windows 10's pace of adoption slowing down over the past couple of months.

In other words, keep the usual pinch of salt to hand…

That said, Christmas sales of new devices certainly won't have hurt Windows 10's prospects. Hopefully we'll get some more official figures from Microsoft soon.

Meanwhile, Redmond is likely to continue to push Windows 7 and 8.1 users to upgrade, and we've seen some dubious tactics of late including presenting options in a manner skewed towards getting folks to make the leap to Windows 10 (and indeed allegedly messing with utilities which block the pop-up Windows 10 upgrade box).