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What Kind Of Software Do PC Gamers Have Installed On Their Rigs?

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The first of Valve's new software survey results are in, and they provide a fascinating insight into the kind of crap the service's users have installed on their PCs.

The company's surveys have long been a great source of general information on what's popular amongst hardcore PC gamers on the hardware side of things, but the July 2010 results for the first time also show what kinds of software these gamers have installed on their computers.

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Steam, obviously, is installed on 100% of computers, what with it being mandatory to access Steam. But after that the commonality of programs drops off remarkably. Only 96.79% of users have Flash, where you'd expect that to be 100%, while the next most popular piece of software was Adobe's PDF reader Acrobat at 73.18%.

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Firefox is king of the browsers at 63.05%, WinRAR is the most popular archiving tool at 45.28% and Microsoft will be pleased that its Flash competitor, Silverlight, is installed on 53.13% of responding user's PCs.

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On the surprising side, nearly 70% of users don't have iTunes installed, over 70% of don't have µTorrent installed, and chat program Xfire had penetration of only 10.54%.

You can see the full software results alongside Valve's regular hardware results at the link below. Mac users note, they're PC-only at the moment, with Mac survey results "coming soon".

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Steam Hardware & Software Survey: July 2010 [Valve]