I need to find a chart showing the typical settings of most PC users as they browse the web:
How many are set to 640 x 480?, 800 x 600?, 1024 x 768?, etc...

I always go by http://www.w3schools.com/browsers/browsers_stats.asp as w3schools.com seems to be pretty accurate. Keep in mind though that the target audience for your website will also play a big roll in resolutions.

This is a very good article on the subject - http://www.baekdal.com/reports/actual-browser-sizes/

If you use a decent enough web counter then you should be able to generate reports of resolutions of your own visitors to your website. We tend to build websites no wider than 800px as this will fit on the majority of peoples screens.

Hi,

you definitely need to know your audience.

I design partly for countries where people tend to surf with old computers and old software. It's not even screen resolution (800x600 mostly) which is a topic there, it also is modern design. CSS will display very badly on these machines, so you still need a tabled design, many scripts are not fully supported either by old browsers and nary a one has the latest gimmicks and software on his machine to e.g. display Flash or work with messengers etc..

And one thing which does apply for all countries, be it USA, EU or wherever:

Most webmasters lately work from broadband lines, many consequently tend to forget, that there are still loads of people out there who access via modem, even in highly industrialised countries. A Flash page or high-quality pictures will inevitably tire these people out and exhaust their patience. The adage that a page should load under 10 seconds on a 56k modem is therefore still valid, but I've come lately across many sites which take several minutes to load on a modem. Loading speed is just as important as screen resolution.

Greetings

OK

Here, I grabbed a screen from the system I use.




width: screen width in pixels
percent: percentage of sessions for screen width
coverage: cumulative coverage percentage for screen width

The cumulative coverage figure helps you select a maximum design
width for your pages by showing what proportion of users can see
a particular width without scrolling horizontally. Users are
tolerant of pages which need to be scrolled vertically, but are
less tolerant of pages forcing them to scroll sideways.

width percent coverage
240 0.05 100.00
320 0.01 99.95
640 0.02 99.94
800 2.36 99.92
1024 32.15 97.56
1152 6.23 65.41
1280 40.26 59.18
1400 3.13 18.92
1440 4.52 15.79
1600 4.55 11.27
1680 4.43 6.72
1920 2.28 2.29
source: http://clickbench.com
update: 29 Sep 2007 07:09:20 GMT

The way to read this is:

32.15% are using a width of 1024, but at 1024 the design will
cover 97.56% of visitors.

At 1280, only 59 percent of visitors can see that width without
horizontal scrolling.

This is for a web master oriented site.

I dont think enyone now use 640 x 480...
The most people today use 1024 x 768 and up

Thanks for all the helpful replies.