The Ultimate Buyer’s Guide to Windows 7 - How to Select the Right Edition

Windows 7 Home Premium has features very similar to XP Home and Vista Home Premium. Not only does it have a very pleasing user interface, the popular Windows Media Center is also present with many improvements including the ability to create DVD movies as well as burning them directly onto DVDs and Blu-ray disks. More importantly, the new backup utility can be used to create full system images so that an exact copy of your entire system is available for restoration purposes. With Virtual PC, Windows 7 allows you to run another OS – a Windows version or Linux – if you so wish. Finally, Home Premium supports up to 16GB of RAM and 2 physical processors with unlimited cores.

 

 

Windows 7 Professional includes all the features of Windows 7 Home Premium along with more advanced networking features. Aimed at small to medium business enterprises, this edition has an ‘offline files’ feature that allows the user to work on an offline copy of files even if the network connection gets dropped. A built-in backup tool makes it easy to backup data to the network. Windows 7 Professional also has more advanced remote desktop access features that will enable others to connect to your computer from virtually any other computer, through the Internet. Furthermore, with the Professional edition, you also get a fully licensed version of XP that can be run on the Virtual PC.

 

 

Windows 7 Ultimate includes all the features of Windows 7 Professional as well as Windows 7 Home Premium and adds advanced security features. Aimed at major business enterprises, Ultimate has the facility to allow multiple languages on the same PC. A large enterprise will truly appreciate features such as Direct Access – allowing employees to access intranet websites and corporate e-mail servers securely; Federated Search – allowing users to search across network drives and BranchCache – allowing users to locally cache frequently accessed web content or data from files to improve efficiency. You also get the BitLocker feature that allows you to easily encrypt files containing sensitive or confidential information not just on your computer but also on removable disks such as a USB flash drive.

 

Your decision on which edition of Windows 7 to install will thus depend largely on whether you are choosing it for a home PC or an office PC and if it is an office PC, on the networking and security needs of your organization.