Windows Market Share Diminishing

OS Market ShareAccording to marketshare.hitslink.com, the Windows operating system is slowly losing market share to Apple and Linux.  Over the past couple of months Apple has gained ground and popularity, and soon will approach 10%.  Linux appears to be approaching th 1% milestone as well, and in my opinion is well overdue.

The overall negative opinion of Windows is one reason for the diminishing market share, plus the attrative ad campains by Apple Computers that have greatly improved Apple’s image as a legitimate and stable Operating System.

Ubuntu Linux has also eaten a chunk out of Windows market share, with it’s innovate open-source linux distribution.  Ubuntu has proven to be a rock solid OS with many windows equivalent applications and features, like Open Office and Gimp.   Ubuntu is also free and can be downloaded via ftp, http, or even through torrents!  You just can’t beat that, plus linux runs on any hardware!

And that is the current state of the OS Market Share.  At this point it looks like Windows is losing ground to it’s competitors Apple and Linux, however we will have to see what happens on October 22 when Windows 7 will be official released.  I am predicting that it will go up to 90% again, but hey it’s just a guess at this point.

What do you think?

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Hosts file fixed

Well I just realized why I was getting connections to www.007guard.com whenever I opened a web browser.  It actually is quite simple really, that is why it was overlooked.

The hosts file is a file that maps out ip-addresses to hosts names in a computer.  When a computer starts up, it loads the hosts file into memory first before it queries any DNS servers.    So what had happened was that Spybot Search and Destroy and added the following entries into my hosts file in Windows 7:

# Start of entries inserted by Spybot – Search & Destroy
127.0.0.1   www.007guard.com
127.0.0.1   007guard.com
127.0.0.1   008i.com
127.0.0.1   www.008k.com
127.0.0.1   008k.com
127.0.0.1   www.00hq.com
127.0.0.1   00hq.com
127.0.0.1   010402.com

As you can see the first entry was “127.0.0.1     www.oo7guard.com”.  This means that whenever a program tries to connect to www.007guard.com, they will be redirected to 127.0.0.1 which we all know to be “localhost” or your own comptuer.  This will effectively block any connections to www.007guard.com.

Anyway, the problem turned out to be a missing entry in the hosts file:

127.0.0.1  localhost

Apparently what was happening is that whenever a connection to localhost was established, Windows first consulted with my hosts file which told it that 127.0.0.1  mapped to www.007guard.com.  This resulted in the following netstat -f output:

netstat -f

The connections are actually legitimate and are nothing to worry about.  To fix this issue, just add the following into you hosts file on the first line.

127.0.0.1  localhost

After adding that into your host file, netstat -f should look like this:

007guard fix

And that’s all too it!  I am so glad that I finally fixed this annoying problem that was been plaguing me for a couple weeks.  Looks like some patience and good research on google paid off! If you are interested in learning more about using the host file to block malware, I would go to http://www.mvps.org/winhelp2002/hosts.htm they have good information on the host file and a pre-made list of sites to block for you.  Remember these techniques will work in every OS (windows, linux, mac) since they all use a host file!

References:
http://forum.avast.com/index.php?PHPSESSID=93034020fb53cd58398b96893f9df3bb&topic=40574.msg340233#msg340233

http://forum.avast.com/index.php?topic=41225.0

http://www.mvps.org/winhelp2002/hosts.htm

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