The creators of the Half Life series has published the results of a recent survey of the hardware and software used by people playing Half Life 2. This makes interesting reading for us, but probably depressing reading for Microsoft.

Just 5.41% of the 395,000 computers that completed the survey were using Windows Vista. Windows XP is still going very strong with a very healthy 93%.

Sound may be one possible reason. As we have previously noted the changes to sound in Vista disabled surround sound. Although gamers tend to want the latest and the best that may have been too great a sacrifice.

You can read the full results on the Steam website. Sadly there are no internal links so you will have to scroll down to find the Windows results (about 3/4 of the way to the bottom)

As an aside, if you have never played the original Half Life and consider yourself a First Person Shooter gamer, you should get yourself a copy as soon as possible. I lost three weeks of evenings to this game and it still stands up today.