Friday, July 16, 2010

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

2 comments:

SamSeiko said... Reply To This Comment

But I'm still using window xp...the upgrade of RAM is just too much for me, otherwise i would use the window 7... well maybe i'm no fan of high-tech CPU...

aLan said... Reply To This Comment

Samseiko,

How much RAM are you using now? My PC is 3.0GHz Intel Prescott with 1.25GB DDR1 (the oldest DDR RAM),and it's running Win7 Home Premium without problems.

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