"We tested things and discovered problems with Vista early on," said Steve Rausch, director of information services at Gibson General Hospital in Princeton, Indiana. "We had issues with it. We couldn't get it to work with our applications," he said. Rejecting Vista ended up costing the hospital money, because it had to pay about US$20 per PC to downgrade to Windows XP.

The new OS makes the decision to buy new hardware easier, as Windows 7 is "not a hindrance as Vista was," Rausch said. The hospital has started rolling out Windows 7 PCs on a per-needed basis, and a large-scale rollout may not happen until more money is available.

"I would like to see that happen in 12 months, but that's being pretty aggressive," Rausch said.

Group One, an options trading firm in San Francisco, is already rolling out Windows 7 systems powered by Intel's latest Nehalem microprocessors, said Terence Judkins, managing director of systems. Windows 7 offers better support for the latest hardware than did previous Windows operating systems.

"When Microsoft offered the Release to Manufacturing to volume license customers in early August, we switched to that not just for new Nehalem machines, but actually for any trading machine" that was being upgraded, Judkins said.