Microsoft Windows 7 has increased its lead over Windows XP in October 2012.

Recorded by Net Applications a detailed Web tracker, Windows 7 scored a total market share of 44.7 percent last month, a slight gain from September’s 44 percent. Over the same time, XP’s share fell from 41.2 percent to 40.7 percent.

The gap between September and October is not large but the numbers show that Windows 7 is slowly gaining more users from the now 11-year-old XP. After years of XP holding the dominant position, Windows 7 finally won the top OS spot this past August according to Net Applications.

Just a year ago, Windows XP’s share was 48 percent, while Windows 7 was resting below 35 percent.

Microsoft had been on a kick to convince consumers and businesses alike to upgrade from XP to Windows 7.

The company has often reminded users that extended support for XP will expire in April 2014. After that point, security patches and other updates will no longer be available, meaning people will be running XP at their own risk.

Microsoft has also been phasing out application support for Windows XP. For example, Internet Explorer 9 and 10 will not run under XP. Office 2013 also will only work under Windows 7 or Windows 8.

The newly launched Windows 8 itself is still barely a blip on the radar as seen by Net Applications, with its pre-launch versions grabbing a share of 0.41 percent last month, compared with 0.3 percent in September. Because the new OS officially debuted just last week, it will be interesting to see the share it captures over the next several months, much is dependent on Windows 8 being a success for Microsoft.

Overall across all Operating Systems, Windows was king of the OS market last month with a share of more than 91 percent, leaving the Mac OS with 7.1 percent and Linux with a little more than 1 percent.

Data Source – Net Applications