PC Pitstop has been collating configuration data since March, during which time it has seen the number of Napster installations grow by a factor of three. Between October and December, for instance, the proportion of surveyed PCs that had the MP3 sharing software installed upon them rose from 17 per cent to 20 per cent. Over the same period, the percentage of home machines that had a copy of Napster grew from 35 per cent to 40 per cent. Well, not much actually. The grow rates for both domestic and office machines is hardly spectacular, and PC Pitstop's sample is hardly huge.
Slow connections are less likely to encourage downloads than fast ones.
And while the kind of people who use Napster frequently are the sort of folk who tend to like owning top-spec. PCs, it doesn't follow that they bought that kit because of Napster, ie. It may be, but you can't really say so on the basis of the company's numbers. Then there's that word, 'usage'. Finding software installed on a sampled PC's hard drive gives no indication of how often that software is used, even if it's running at the time the PC was tested.