The long awaited official launch of Microsoft’s Windows 7 operating system has come and gone. On October 22, 2009, Windows 7 hit the retail shelves. The inital media blitz and the launch parties are now just a fading memory. The early reports appear that folks are generally very positive concerning Microsoft’s newest operating system.

It appears Dell is doing something right when it comes to providing users with desktop computers. It was quite interesting and I was more than a little surprised to see Dell sweep the top ten positions in the PC Pitstop Satisfaction Rankings for Commercial Desktop PCs as of July 2009. The rankings are based solely on user feedback describing their experience with their systems.

As PC Pitstop began collating the user satisfaction feedback for desktop systems, it became evident that there was a significant number of custom built Desktop systems. Based on system information we were able to segregate these custom built systems into a separate satisfaction report. From this we were able to tabulate what motherboards were in the most loved systems. It is interesting to note that 4 out of the top 10 best loved motherboards are AMD boards.

These are exciting times in the world of computing, and portables are seeing all the action. One thing that is becoming obvious is that the line between netbook and notebook is starting to blur. Netbooks are becoming more powerful and Notebooks are becoming lighter, and longer lasting. Shown below are your picks for Most Loved Notebooks. Keep in mind that Netbooks have been filtered out of these results and were the category we used to kick off the Most Loved series. You can find those results in the previous July Newsletter or by looking for previous articles in TechTalk.

Welcome everyone to a new and very exciting part of PC Pitstop. Roughly a year ago, as part of the incredibly popular OverDrive test, we began collecting user input about PC satisfaction. We began asking the following three questions:

• * How satisfied are you with this PC?
• * Is this PC running slow?
• * Is this PC hanging or requiring frequent reboots?

Netbooks – those ultra small portable PCs – are they a niche product, a passing fad or an up and coming product just in its infancy? PC Pitstop analyzed the prevalence of netbooks that ran our on-line diagnostic scans during Q4 2008 and Q1 2009. For the purpose of our analysis, we looked at processor descriptions as well as the display size for portables. For the most part, we found that the netbooks usually contained the Intel® Atomâ„¢ processor. We also set a filter for portable display size of less than 11 inches for the purpose of our analysis.

What graphics cards were surfacing as the top 3D video perforrmers based on the test results captured during the first month since its roll out?

Since its release in early May 2008, there has been plenty of press concerning the issues with Microsoft’s XP Service Pack 3. Common sense would tell us that such negative press would drastically slow the rate that folks would update to the release. PC Pitstop analyzed the percentage of XP users that have updated their systems to SP3 during the first three months since its release and compared them to the adoption rates of SP2 during its roll out.

Back in May 2006, when Microsoft announced Vista system memory requirements of 512 MB for “Vista Capable” and 1 GB for “Vista Premium Ready” classifications, the average XP system had 833 MB and 659 MB of installed memory for Desktop and Portable systems respectively. Once Vista was released in early 2007, most users determined that “more memory was better” as the average installed desktop memory rose relatively quickly to over 2 GB on Vista systems. In recent months, it is not uncommon for PC manufacturers to market Vista systems with 3 GB of RAM. The emergence of 64-bit architecture has also likely played a role in the increase of average RAM.

It’s no secret that Vista operating system upped the ante for video adapter requirements. PC Pitstop took a look at the PCs running our online tests during the month of February 2008 to find out more about video card prevalence.