Microsoft's Windows beat operating system rivals Mac OS X and Ubuntu in a three-month test of update server uptime, a Swedish uptime monitoring company said.

According to Pingdom, Microsoft's update servers were available to users 100 per cent of the time during the three-month stretch of April, May and June, with no apparent down time. Apple's update servers, meanwhile, were offline for 2 hours and 34 minutes during that period (99.9 per cent uptime) while the main repository of Ubuntu, one of the most popular consumer distributions of Linux, was dark for 1 day, 5 hours and 45 minutes (98.6 per cent uptime).

In a post to its company blog last week, Pingdom outlined how it pinged the update servers and Ubuntu repository every five minutes during the second quarter. Any offline indication was confirmed from two different locations, said the company.

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