Unless your name is Acer, there’s a good chance you’re smiling slightly today. Analysts at Gartner have just released their estimates of the number of PCs sold in the first three months of 2014, and for the first time in quite a while it’s not a doom and gloom story about falling sales. Indeed, outside of the region it denotes as Asia/Pacific, sales area actually up on the same period in 2013.

Unless your name is Acer, that is. The Taiwanese firm was the only major name to lose sales in all regions, with a huge 14.8% drop over last year. Otherwise, Lenovo saw an increase of just under 11%, HP grew the number of PCs sold by 4.1%, increased by 9% and so on.

The total number of PCs sold worldwide did drop – from 78 million to 76.5 million – but in the US total sales were actually up a bit and in Europe and Africa they were static.

Gartner points to two reasons for the arrest of the decline (overall, last year’s numbers were dire). One is that tablet spending in developed markets is slowing and the other is that the end of service packs for Windows XP forcing firms to upgrade.

From the press release:

“The end of XP support by Microsoft on 8th April has played a role in the easing decline of PC shipments,” said Mikako Kitagawa, principal analyst at Gartner. “All regions indicated a positive effect since the end of XP support stimulated the PC refresh of XP systems. Professional desktops, in particular, showed strength in the quarter. Among key countries, Japan was greatly affected by the end of XP support, registering a 35 per cent year-over-year increase in PC shipments. The growth was also boosted by sales tax change. We expect the impact of XP migration worldwide to continue throughout 2014.”

Gartner’s numbers for PCs include PCs, laptops and x86-powered tablets with Windows 8 installed. The firms final numbers for global sales over the period are below:

[Image – Shutterstock]