It should be a simple choice you either take the plunge and upgrade your computer to Windows 7 or continue with your existing Windows. And yet, as is often the case, the choice is not as easy as it looks because once you make your mind to upgrade to Windows 7, you will also have to choose the right version of Windows 7 that will fulfill your needs.
Windows 7 comes in six different editions – Windows 7 Home Basic, Home Premium, Professional, Enterprise, and Ultimate. Now choosing the right edition from out of these six variation may seem like a daunting task but in real world, you’ll have only three Windows 7 editions to choose from. Here’s why:
Which Windows 7 edition is not for me?
The Windows 7 Starter edition is designed for basic computing tasks such as, e-mailing, net surfing, etc. and is optimized for less powerful machines like your Atom powered netbook. You won’t get Windows 7 Starter at the retail stores as it will only come pre-installed with new notebook computers globally.
Windows 7 Home Basic is not as limited as the starter edition but it will be available only in developing countries including India, China, Philippines, etc with new computers. Then you have the Windows 7 Enterprise edition which is almost similar to Windows 7 Ultimate but for businesses who go for volume licensing.
None of the above mentioned Windows 7 editions will be available for general retail in boxed offerings. Your choice is therefore simplified to the remaining three editions – Windows 7 Home Premium, Professional, and Ultimate.
Windows 7 Home Premium VS Professional VS Ultimate editions
The different editions of Windows 7 are developed such that each edition has all the features of the previous editions plus something extra that makes that edition unique. Also, you can use the Anytime Upgrade feature to get a serial key online and upgrade your existing Windows 7 license to a more advanced edition. For example, if you want to buy Windows 7 Home Premium today, you can use Anytime Upgrade and shift to Windows 7 Professional or Ultimate edition anytime.
To help you decide which edition of Windows 7 to buy, here’s a quick descriptions of features that are available in each of the Windows 7 versions.
Windows 7 Home Premium
Windows 7 Home Premium, similar to XP Home and Vista Home Premium, is for home users worldwide with a very pleasing Aero glass user interface. Windows 7 Home Premium edition has Windows Media Center to help you play a wide variety of multimedia formats including DVD and there’s a default DVD maker to create DVD movies or for burning files and disk images to CD, DVD, and Bluray disks directly from Explorer.
Windows 7 Professional
Windows 7 Professional offers all the features of Windows 7 Home Premium, and then adds some advanced networking features. For example, the Location Aware Printing feature allows you to choose different default printers for different networks and is useful for people who use the same laptop in multiple locations for example, at home and in office.
Windows 7 Ultimate
Windows 7 Ultimate has all the features of Windows 7 Home Premium and Professional, plus some additional enterprise and security related features. Ultimate also lets you use multiple languages on the same system.
The enterprise centric features include Federated Search, for searching across network drives, Direct Access, you can access corporate e-mail servers, shared folders, or intranet Web sites securely without connecting to a VPN, Branch Cache, it caches local copies of content from Web and file servers to improve performance and a system that lets you run UNIX applications on Windows.
With Windows 7 Ultimate, you get the ability to boot from a virtual hard drive and the new BitLocker-to go feature allows you to encrypt files on your computer as well as removable disks like that USB Pen drive.
While selecting an edition, price will be also a deciding factor for many users. Home Premium is the cheapest retail version of Windows 7, but it will also come as a Family Pack allowing you to use the same license on up to 3 computers in one home. If you have multiple desktop and notebook computers to upgrade, you will see significant savings from the Family Pack offer.
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