I assume that also doesn't count package manager or App Store installs. Still, OSX seems to be quite a big market there.

I wonder how many percentiles of the Windows number comes from Windows' re-re-re-re-install-ish nature. "Dang, my FPS is low, I gotta "format Windows" again."

I've always held install/download statistics to be just a rough, rough estimate. Personally, I know I can spin up a Windows VM within the span of a lunch break and run a script to automatically install all my default applications (even if I don't plan on using them). When I'm finished with whatever task I'm doing, I delete the VM.

With VLC and Firefox et al, I know reinstalls contribute to a lot of "downloads" numbers. I take the number at face value: it's popular enough to have been downloaded 1 billion times, regardless of how many people are using it right now.

I haven't had to reinstall Windows since upgrading to 7, and didn't really reinstall that often with XP either. Maybe it's just me, but I don't think this has been a big issue in quite a while.

I had a problematic driver state, where hibernate stoppped working. I put up with it for more than a year. Then I bothered to reinstall win 7. And I am amazed at how useful hibernate actually is in my day to day life! Also pressing the touchpanel and deactivating the wifi module use to kill the machine :|

I blame Dell for this issue though, not win7.

I still have a 6 year old Vista partition from when it first launched somewhere (which has since been updated with SP2 ofc).

I have written off ever trying to make that drive look pretty again without breaking everything, but it does still boot and I think all the applications start. Baby steps M$!

I wasn't thinking that, but I was wondering what percentage were incremental upgrades. In other words, I install 1.0, then 1.0.1, then 1.0.2,...

Incremental updates like that could artificially inflate the download numbers. Take that and multiply it by the number of computers you have.

Big numbers are still impressive though.

Pretty sure that died out in the XP days and even then it was due to malware.