Windows 7 unit sales in the U.S. were 234 percent higher than Vista's first few days of sales. A combination of early discounts on pre-sales and a lack of promotional activity for the Ultimate version resulted in dollar sales that were 82 percent higher than Vista.

"Microsoft's program of early low-cost pre-sales, high-visibility marketing, and aggressive deals helped make the Windows 7 software launch successful," said Stephen Baker, vice president of industry analysis at NPD. "In a slow environment for packaged software, Windows 7 brought a large number of customers into the software aisles."

PC Hardware Sales Measured

While boxed software sales were up compared to the Vista launch, PC hardware sales had more of an uphill battle. PC sales growth was higher than any week during the high-volume back-to-school third quarter, but not as strong as growth during the Vista launch, NPD said.

Total Windows PC sales were up 49 percent year-over-year and 95 percent over the week before launch. However, PC sales growth during the Vista launch was stronger, soaring 68 percent over the previous year and 170 percent over the week preceding the launch. Windows PC sales were down six percent compared to PC sales during the Vista launch week.

"A combination of factors impacted Windows 7 PC sales at the outset, but the trajectory of overall PC sales is very strong leading into the holiday season," said Baker. "Vista had a slight advantage at launch, as January traditionally has a bigger sales footprint than October. The other hurdle Windows 7 faced was that sales of PCs with older operating systems (XP and Vista) were high, making up 20 percent of sales during the Windows 7 launch, compared to just six percent of older operating sales during Vista's launch week."

Preparing for Patch Tuesday

With Patch Tuesday coming, many are looking for bugs in Windows 7. So far there aren't any. That's good news, since many IT departments are still working through the large number of patches delivered last month from Microsoft, Oracle, Adobe and others. Next Tuesday, Microsoft will deliver three critical patches and three important patches.

Paul Henry, Lumension security and forensic analyst, said three of the November patches appear to be updates to or re-releases of patches that were issued last month, including Live Communications Server 2005 and Office Communications Server 2007, as well as scenarios involving the usage of Windows Server Update Services or running Microsoft Office Access Runtime 2003.

"In addition to Microsoft's round of patches, a bug has been discovered in Linux that gives untrusted users root access. Red Hat has patches available for versions 4 and 5 of RHEL and MRG," Henry said.

"Another recently discovered SSL flaw, which aids in facilitating a man-in-the-middle attack, is expected to bring a large number of patches in the near term from multiple vendors. We won't see anything to remediate this flaw on Patch Tuesday, but if a number of active exploits start to appear in the wild, then we will most likely see out-of-band patches issued from pretty much every vendor as it is such a widely used protocol."