Is Windows 7 Home Premium good enough? Do you need Professional or Ultimate edition?

MS Windows 7 has been around for quite some times now, and the OS for new computers nowadays will be Windows 7 (no more Vista nor XP), beside Linux.

If you were to pick Windows 7, as a home user, you have a few options. Most PC vendors will let you select between Win 7 Home Premium or Win 7 Professional.

The question that many buyer will ask: Is Win 7 Home Premium good enough? Do I need to pay extra for the extra features in Professional or even Ultimate edition?

I found a report by Ed Bott in ZDNet pretty informative.

After reading the article, I found that most home user should be enough with Home Premium, unless:

• Your computer has more than 16GB RAM, or plan to upgrade the RAM to that amount in near future.
• You want easy access to network projectors.
• You want a one-button way (the Presentation Mode) to disable things like pop-up notifications and screen savers.  
• You want a built-in Encryption File System (EFS) to encrypt a file or folder inside your Home folder so that it can only be unlocked when you log on with your user credentials. (Note: there are 3rd party alternatives which are equivalent or better than this)
• You want to have a licensed copy of Windows XP (at no additional cost) to run as virtualized machine within your Windows 7.
• You want your system image backup files to be stored across the network. (Home Premium will store it locally)
• You want a built-in folder synchronization feature similar to Windows Live Mesh. (You need to install separately for Home Premium)
• You want to make full use of Active Directory features. (Do you have many Windows PC at home until you need to use Active Directory?)
• You want a built-in Remote Desktop server for other to remotely access and control your computer.

The above are additional features in Win 7 Professional on top of Home Premium. And the below are additional features in Win 7 Ultimate on top of Professional:

• Boot from virtual hard drive
• Availability of Multilingual User Interface (MUI) packs. (Language Interface Pack is available for other editions of Win 7)
• BranchCache and DirectAccess to improve connectivity on networks that use Windows Server 2008 R2
• AppLocker
• BitLocker drive encryption
• Subsystem for UNIX applications