What's really in each Windows 7 Edition?
link: original article - section: windows
Over the course of its Windows 7 development effort, Microsoft has been incredibly controlled about releasing details, pursuing an agonizingly deliberate disclosure plan.
This week, they finally announced the official release dates: RTM next month, on sale beginning October 22. The last remaining pieces of the puzzle? There’s the price list, of course, which I don’t think will be revealed publicly until close to the on-sale dates. The other missing detail is the exact breakdown of features in each edition.
I’ve been pestering contacts at Microsoft for an official features list for months, and they’ve politely but persistently refused every one of my requests. So, as part of the research for Windows 7 Inside Out, I did the work myself. I installed copies of each Windows 7 edition from the Release Candidate (build 7100) code on a single machine, resulting in a five-way multiboot system. Then I tallied up which features were in each edition, trying out each one to see if I could identify unexpected behavior.
Several people in comments complained that the original illustration I used above was hard to follow because I used different partition sizes. I was surprised to read that, because I had originally intended this screen shot to be an illustration showing that I had five operating systems installed on a single system (on a single drive, in fact). I didn’t realize that people would be interested in the numbers. So, dear readers, I went back and made those partitions identical in size and reshot the screen and uploaded it here and added this update. I installed a few utility applications in different partitions. For example, the Starter partition has Windows Live Essentials installed. None of the installed programs were large, but they do affect the numbers slightly.
If you’re wondering why Ultimate is using about 3 GB more disk space than Home Premium, there’s a simple answer. The Ultimate install is the original one for this system. Because it’s an older installation it has many more automatic restore points saved. The newer Home Premium install has about 400 MB of volume shadow (restore point) space in use. The Ultimate install has 3.1 GB in use. The difference between those two values, 2.7 GB, almost exactly accounts for the difference in size. And no, I’m not going to reshoot this screen again!
