Windows 7 Performance Guide
by Ryan Smith and Gary Key on October 26, 2009 12:00 AM EST- Posted in
- Systems
The Only 3 Editions You’ll Care About
With Windows Vista, Microsoft split up the 2.5 editions of Windows XP in to 6 editions of Vista. It was confusing, it was pricey, and if you were an Ultimate user it was downright infuriating (see: Ultimate Extras). For Windows 7, things are going to get slightly better from a logical standpoint, but as there’s going to be 6 editions of Win7, we’re not going back to the simplicity of XP.
Microsoft has simplified things from Vista in two major ways. First and foremost, all editions are now supersets of each other. In particular this means that Professional (née: Business) now has all of Home Premium’s features, as opposed to cutting out certain entertainment features like Vista did. This makes each edition “better” than the previous edition in a straightforward manner, and removes the slight schism we saw between Vista Business and Vista Home Premium users. It also makes Win7 Ultimate an oddity; in Vista it unified the feature set of Business and Home Premium editions, but in Win7 it simply adds the niche features that keep Enterprise and Professional editions differentiated.
The second simplification is that Home Basic is gone from the market of developed nations, period. Home Basic is now Microsoft’s “emerging markets” edition, offering a more limited feature set amid a significantly lower price. But as far as we’re concerned, what this means is that the only home edition is now Home Premium, as opposed to having a few Home Basic machines sprinkled around to make things frustrating.
This leaves us with 5 editions we’re going to see in the developed world: Starter, Home Premium, Professional, Enterprise, and Ultimate. Starter is now the “super cheap” edition for OEMs (and only OEMs), but we don’t know much beyond that. We still haven’t seen it appear on any computers, and quite frankly we’re not sure how Microsoft is going to push such a feature-castrated version to OEMs that have previously been enjoying cheap full copies of Windows XP. Meanwhile Enterprise maintains its status as the volume license version of Windows, and as such it’s not something that regular users can buy (if you need its features, that’s what Ultimate is for).
| Win7 Home Premium | Win7 HP Family Pack | Win7 Professional | Win7 Ultimate | |
| Retail Price | $200 | X | $300 | $320 |
| OEM Price | $110 | X | $150 | $190 |
| Upgrade Price | $120 | $150 | $200 | $220 |
| RAM Limit | 16GB | 16GB | 192GB | 192GB |
| Notable features | Windows Media Center | 3 copies of Win7 Home Premium | Remote Desktop hosting, WinXP Virtual Machine | BitLocker, VHD booting |
This leaves us with the 3 editions you actually need to care about: Home Premium ($110/$200), Professional ($150/$300), and Ultimate ($190/$320). Given the prices in particular, I expect to see Home Premium being the most common version among techies and regular users alike, but this does mean giving up Remote Desktop hosting and Windows XP Mode (the WinXP virtual machine), among other things. Ultimate has very little going for it unless you’re going to use BitLocker or boot off of VHD files. But then again at retail it’s only $20 more.
Meanwhile Microsoft has finally taken a page out of the Apple playbook by offering a family pack. The Windows 7 Home Premium Family Pack ($150) is a set of 3 Home Premium upgrade licenses in a single box and using a single key, for those of you who want to upgrade every computer in the house at once. This brings the per-license cost down to $50, more than half-off the price of a single license. Now if Microsoft would just offer Office in a similar manner… (Ed: Turns out they do)
Finally, there’s a pretty big difference in hardware support that we should note: Home Premium tops out at 16GB of RAM, Professional/Ultimate top out at 192GB. The ramifications of this being that if you’re considering throwing Home Premium on to a high-end Core i7 system, or even just intend to carry forward a retail licensed copy for a number of years, then it’s possible you’re going to hit the 16GB cap of Home Premium.
Finally, while we’re on the subject, we’re going to once again remind everyone that Microsoft has locked out the ability to install multiple versions of Windows with the same disc (One Disc mode). This will have little impact at the most for regular users, but techies are going to want to burn a disc with ei.cfg stripped out to make fixing computers easier. We’ve said it before and we’ll say it again, locking out One Disc mode is an extremely disappointing move from Microsoft.
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Exar3342 - Monday, October 26, 2009 - link
Darwinosx: "Is this the new mac operating system?"Apple store employee: "Yes, it is called 'Snow Leopard'".
Darwinosx: "I like cats...this must be the best around because of the cute kitty on the box. I will buy it!"
JimmyJimmington - Monday, October 26, 2009 - link
Yup, macs have no security vulnerabilities at all. Exactly.StevoLincolnite - Monday, October 26, 2009 - link
MacOSX is far from the best Operating system out there, it has a tiny market share, lacks software/API compatibility, and usually comes with rather antiquated hardware, and cheap plastic looks. (Even the Aluminum bodied ones, look cheap and flimsy to me, despite them being of a solid build).I usually avoid all Articles based around the Mac because it's completely pointless to read, I have never owned a Mac, I never want to own a Mac, I have used a Mac and hated every moment of it, not because of the "Brand" but because I have to "Search" for OSX variations of the software I use, in such a case the Operating system is useless to me.
Windows 7 is awesome, been using it since the early Beta's, It's like a "Fine Wine" version of Vista, it's Vista that got better with age. - I don't expect a Mac user to understand the difference's as they are generally limited in intellectual capability.
******
What I REALLY wanted from this article is Windows 7's performance on something like the Atom 230/330 based processors so we can see how usable the Operating system is on such processors.
darwinosx - Monday, October 26, 2009 - link
I didn't say it was the best now did I? But it is certainly better than this band aided and scotch taped version of Vista. I don't have any particular idea of a "best" OS in mind because I work with all of them. I have for 20+ years and I am quite well paid for it. Whereas you still get an allowance from daddy.Market share is no measure of how good something is. That is obvious.
Software/API compatibility? Meaning what exactly? I'd like to hear because I don't think you know.
Tell me one thing that is antiquated about Mac hardware? Plastic? What plastic? Your comments on the unibody are laughable. I'll leave it at that.
Oh you had to "search" for Mac software. That must have been difficult for you.
I understand you are just some teenager who doesn't know anything. But don't think everyone here is the same as you.
B3an - Monday, November 2, 2009 - link
Another moronic Mac user that knows nothing. All your points about about 7 are a joke. Chances are you have not even used it.The only "malware fest" was windows XP. I've used Vista since release with UAC turned off - never got anything.
And yes 7 uses more RAM, as it's a real OS and not a toy, it supports hundreds of thousands of 3rd party hardware and software, it can do a lot more. This tends to increase the complexity of an OS.
If OSX was actually good enough for most people to use, it would be a security mess as hackers would actually bother to attack it, and theres noway it's as secure as Vista or 7 if it came down to that.
Ahmed0 - Monday, October 26, 2009 - link
Remember kids, dont put your hands through the cage and dont feed the trolls.Lifted - Monday, October 26, 2009 - link
You should stock up on the pads as it looks like you're in for some heavy flow this month ma'am.Sc4freak - Monday, October 26, 2009 - link
"But what I don’t get is why there’s any reason good enough for Windows to not come with an email client at all. It’s 2009, why is there an operating system being released without an email client?"But you see, that would be violating anti-competition laws and would reduce consumer choice. Bundling Windows Live Mail is clearly unfair to Mozilla Thunderbird, Opera Mail, and all the other email client providers out there!
Obviously, the solution is that Microsoft must implement a ballot screen into Windows so users can choose whether to use Windows Live Mail or another competing product. Yep.
darwinosx - Monday, October 26, 2009 - link
Bundling these apps was only an issue in Europe not in the U.S. It wasn't all of these apps ether. The biggest issue Microsoft regarding bundling is the browser and they still bundle that. So whatever Microsoft reason is for that it had nothing to do with bundling or anti-trust.A bigger question is why in an OS released in 2009 do you still need to manually defrag, still need registry cleaners, layers of anti-malware, and various other 3rd party utilities just to make it usable and semi-reliable? Pretty sad.
ProDigit - Tuesday, October 27, 2009 - link
I prefer to do these things manually!Automatic defrag in Vista and 7 is one of the major reasons for a degrading OS over time (in speed).
I prefer keeping control over many of the 'automatic' services,which somehow always seem to interfere with performance..
Ever played a game,and in the middle noticed a virusscan was happening on the background?
Or what about just silently reading a webpage, on the last of your battery of a laptop, and noticing how the HDD light flickers like crazy, making this annoying HDD sound while you're reading?
Those are the curses of the automatic tasks.
One of the first thing I did with XP and win98, when it got released,was disable the automatic task scheduler!
Some find automatic tasks a blessing, some a curse.
A Defrag on a normal system should be done twice or trice a year, not every day like Vista (provided if you stay above the 20% freespace).