A Look at the Windows Vista Editions (Part 1 of 2)

Posted by : Jim Posted on : 12-12-2006

As you may know, Microsoft’s Windows Vista was released to manufacturing last month and will be available to consumers at the end of January (it is already available to businesses). You may also know that Microsoft is releasing five different versions of Vista in developed markets with a sixth version available to developing nations. Unfortunately, getting all of the features you want in a single version of Vista is not as simple as you would like it to be (unless you want Vista Ultimate edition and are prepared to pony up $400 for a full version or $260 for an upgrade from XP).

With Windows XP, Microsoft essentially had two versions of the OS; home and professional. Professional was simply a superset of the home edition – it has everything in home plus features of interest to IT professionals and business users. Microsoft also had two other versions of the OS – a Tablet PC version that was only of interest to the six or seven people who owned a Tablet PC and a Windows Media Center version. The Media center version went through three iterations finally ending with Media Center 2005. One of the key differences between Media Center 2005 and the previous versions of Media Center was that 2005 was built on the XP home framework thus it lacked the ability to join Windows domains.

With Windows Vista, Microsoft is definitively segmenting the market between the home and the business user. Unless one purchases the aforementioned Ultimate edition, a user will need to decide whether they want to give up the home features or the business features. If you are really interested in the specific details, I encourage you to download Microsoft’s Windows Vista Product Guide. It is distributed in two formats; XPS which can be ready using Microsoft’s new XPS reader in Vista or in the Office 2007 document format. If you don’t have Office 2007 yet, you can download a converter for older versions of Office here.

To keep things simple, I am going to touch on the highlights of the different versions as I understand them.

For the home market, Microsoft has two versions; Home Basic and Home Premium. The new/upgrade prices are as follows: Home Basic ($200/$100), and Home Premium ($240/$160). It is curious that the differential between Home Basic and Home Premium is $40 for the new version but $60 for the upgrade version. Either way, given the extra feature set afforded by home premium, it is probably a no brainier to go with the premium version unless the user is definitely not going to take advantage of the premium feature set. So what do you get for the extra dough? Well here are some of the added features: