The PC is not going down without a fight, says HP. Gartner points its finger at low tablet sales and Windows XP.

Back in July, we have talked about how consumers shouldn’t dismiss the PC just yet. Hewlett Packard’s surprisingly strong third quarter, seems to be a testament of the value consumers still hold on PCs. HP has been struggling with low numbers, and the recent surge from PC sales comes not a moment too soon, as the company follows through with Meg Whitman’s restructuring, in the form of 34,000 impending job cuts.

This is particularly good news for HP, as PC and notebook sales make up for 40% of the company’s revenue.

According to market research Gartner, there is more to the rise of the PC, than consumer appeal.

Tablet sales have remained dull for sometime, and market analysts have been pointing their finger at lack of innovation, and trends suggesting that consumers are divided between those who want the smaller but more portable screen of a “phablet”, or the full-size experience of a laptop, or other variants of the PC, depending on requirements.

Ranjit Atwal, research director at Gartner, describes the rise of the PC as the “revival of the global PC market”, as he remarks that, while 2013 has seen a 9.5% dip in ultraportables, desktops and hybrids, such as the Apple Macbook Air, or the Microsoft Surface, this year Atwal expects the PC market to suffer barely a 2.9% decrease in sales.

Is it official? Are tablet’s low sales helping the PC? The most recent numbers seem to point in such direction, and consumer trends have been under scrutiny, showing consumers as less than excited over tablets, as they would be, over a new phone, or laptop.

Atwal’s opinion on this trend takes an interesting turn as he explains that part of the surge in PC sales is also due to the retirement of Windows XP, causing what appears to be close to 60 million PC’s being replaced with new devices.

A lower price tag is what Gartner expects as the motivator of PC sales in the near future, more so than performance, as iOS and Android will still be the dominant software platforms for the foreseeable future.