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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gutterslob - Tuesday, October 27, 2009 - link
Anandtech really needs someone that's better experienced at Linux.Now, I'm neither a Wintard or Freetard, but there's no balance whatsoever everytime I see them bring Ubuntu into the comparisons. I often wonder whether they broke their Linux install with the numbers they obtain.
I don't have Win7 yet, but there's no way Ubuntu 9.04 boots that slow. I've seen it boot faster on 3 yr old laptops. I've not tried Ubuntu 9.10 yet (I'm mainly a Debian user), but from al the tests I've seen, it should blow away Win7,Vista,XP in the boot speed department.
I agree that laptop battery life on Linux isn't as good as Windows out of the box, but a install a couple of apps (available on most distro repositories) and most people can get equal or better life on Linux. My Asus eeePC can run 8+hrs with on Arch Linux after minimal tweaking (I never got that much from XP even when the battery was brand new).
I seriously hope AnandTech finds someone who knows Linux better (at least someone with comparable levels of knowledge that AnandTech seems to have with Windows). I've met highschool students with better Linux Know-how than this place... which is a shame, really, because other than that, I think very highly of AnandTech.
Just my 2 cents
Cheers~
Voo - Tuesday, October 27, 2009 - link
"I agree that laptop battery life on Linux isn't as good as Windows out of the box, but a install a couple of apps (available on most distro repositories)"Well the vast majority of home users don't know which apps that would be and won't find out about them
And ArchLinux is a really sleek distribution, last time I checked the GUI wasn't even part of the standard installation. The same goes for self compiled kernels and similar things - certainly possibly but irrelevant for 99.99% of the users.
It's the out of the box performance that's interesting for the majority (after all they didn't do anything for Windows as well), the users who enjoy playing with their PC usually already use Linux and know the advantages.
JarredWalton - Wednesday, October 28, 2009 - link
FWIW, I worked with a "Linux Guru" -- a Senior Linux guy at a big OEM heavily involved with the ArchLinux community -- and we worked to run some additional tests on the NV52. So far, we didn't manage anything significantly better, but you can probably blame ATI's drivers as much as anything. We'll be working to expand Linux coverage (with him doing more of the work) in the future.Honestly, though, after spending the better part of two weeks going through numerous settings and trying to tweak ArchLinux to get significantly better battery life... well, I'm just not seeing it. I'm sure it's possible to do with the right hardware (i.e. NOT ATI!), but Linux is hardly a panacea. If you want good mobility, it's going to be tons easier for 99.999% of users to skip Linux (or get a netbook with Linux pre-installed).
JimmiG - Tuesday, October 27, 2009 - link
"The concern we have is that all of these auto-elevating programs are an obvious target for a local privilege escalation attack to accomplish something similar, if not the same. Imagine finding a way to make the Display control panel execute a 3rd party application with admin privileges, for example."Well, the same could be done in Vista... The control panel applets aren't auto-elevated, but anyone who plans on doing anything useful with them is going to elevate them anyway. So UAC in Win7 should be as effective in Win7 as it was in Vista, granting administrative privileges only to applications that really need it.
Also, the fact that UAC is less annoying is going to be a huge security improvement on its own since fewer users are likely to turn it off. Many users are good enough with computers to figure out how to turn off UAC, but don't know enough to realize that they compromise security by doing this. They think it's condescending, always questioning the user. In fact, the prompts are there to prevent malicious software from gaining sufficient privileges to compromise the computer system, not to prevent the user from performing the tasks he/she wants. That's why Server 2008, as well as OSX and almost every Linux distribution has a similar feature.
anandtech02148 - Tuesday, October 27, 2009 - link
Of all things, multiplayer pc gaming is not mention in windows 7 (10,000 beta testers they say), and apparently Punkbuster is the defacto use for pc multiplayers and the majority of the developers.Consumers will like windows 7, the level of shine and sleek looking is pretty close to MacOs even themes,background on win7 is enjoyable compare to the years of dull blue windows.
but what the crap, how long will i have to wait for a patch for this punkbuster.
haplo602 - Tuesday, October 27, 2009 - link
it seems to me that if Linux did what MS does with marketing, we'd have a new major Linux version every year :-) (under Linux I mean a distro like Suse or Ubuntu).too much hype about too little a change. basicaly they are milking $$$ out of people for performance that should have been in Vista and naming it Windows 7 ... yeah ... More like Vista SP1 that this should have been.
anyway I don't see a reason to upgrade from XP (moving to Linux completely on my next new HW build anyway).
Also, to the folks complaining about missing codecs, mail client and whatnot. MS is essentialy stupid. If they followed the Linux distro model, they could just sell the core OS to OEMs and let them create distributions with any applications the OEMs like. This way they get around the anti-trust issues and also get rid of supporting the distributions. but guess they are too stupid to do that.
Chlorus - Tuesday, October 27, 2009 - link
"Also, to the folks complaining about missing codecs, mail client and whatnot. MS is essentialy stupid."Yeah, because the distro vendors make so much money! Oh wait...
alpine18 - Tuesday, October 27, 2009 - link
In 1995 I remember talking to an older guy that worked at Radio Shack about Windows. He said he'd never upgrade from Windows 3.1 to Windows 95 because he said the memory usage was wasteful, and because even the OK buttons took up 16K of memory each.Over the years have I often wondered if he is still running Windows 3.1.
xrror - Tuesday, October 27, 2009 - link
Problem is, he was right...It's wasn't so great to watch your decked out 4mb 386 that worked well in win3.11 choke horribly just trying to load the win95 taskbar.
Then again, it didn't really help that Microsoft was saying win95 worked fine with 4mb ram. Note fine doesn't imply being able to use more than one application at once.
heh, no the real question is if he is still running win3.1 exclusively
mejobloggs - Monday, October 26, 2009 - link
I have Vista... And from what I can see in this article, there is no point in upgrading to Win 7I'd upgrade for $20 or so, but anything more seems a waste of money