Do you need more than Windows 7 Home Premium?
link: original article - section: windows
One of the most frequent questions I get these days comes from people who’ve been running the Windows 7 beta and RC and are planning to upgrade to the final version when it’s available on October 22. “Which edition of Windows 7 do I need?”
Interestingly, this question also comes up in other contexts as well. When Apple defenders appear in the TalkBack section here, they regularly insist that the Home Premium edition is “crippled” and “stripped-down.” Sooner or later, they insist, any self-respecting Windows user will have to upgrade. Based on that argument, they say that you must use the more expensive Ultimate edition to compare the costs of a Windows PC to those of a Mac, which comes in only a single edition. As you’ll see from the table below, this isn’t accurate.
On the Windows side, many users just automatically assume that more is better. By that logic, Ultimate is obviously the best and lesser versions are inferior. Because they’re power users, they assume that Home Premium’s missing features mean they’re going to be lacking a feature they really need.
But is that true? If you’re buying Windows Home Premium, what features are you missing, exactly? What would you get if you paid extra for Windows 7 Professional or Ultimate? And is it fair to compare OS X and Windows 7 Home Premium?
A few weeks ago, I did an exhaustive comparison of the differences between Windows 7 editions. For the comparison here, I decided to strip the list down to a single, simple table, which represents the entire list of features that are in Professional or Ultimate editions that are not in Home Premium edition (with one esoteric exception, which I documetned at the end of the notes page). For comparison’s sake, I included OS X in the table as well. As you can see, OS X has much more in common with Windows 7 Home Premium than it does with the features in Professional and Ultimate editions. That shouldn’t be a surprise, because those two upgraded Windows editions are specifically aimed at customers running on Windows-based networks.
Note that this is not a Windows 7 versus Mac OS X smackdown. Rather, it’s strictly designed to help you see whether you need one or more unique features from the Professional and Ultimate editions or whether the mainstream Home Premium edition will meet your needs.
