I’m buying my boss a new laptop. It comes pre-loaded with Windows 7 Home Premium. I’m trying to research if he needs to upgrade to Professional but all I’m seeing is either marketing non-speak or technical techo-babble I don’t reaaaaally understand.
Can someone explain to me, in layman’s terms, the difference between Windows 7 Home Premium and Professional?
Here is the difference from the MS Website
You can see it depends on the individual needs
Yeah, I went there, but that doesn’t really clarify it for me. Sure, sure, I may just be stoopid. But that’s why I turn to the Great Minds of the Dope.
Basically Win 7 Pro has a few more features which may or may not be useful. Most important, probably, is that Pro can join domains – which is critical to join certain office networks. However, I don’t know if you’re office runs a domain, and for that you’d have to ask the IT department.
Other features are some backup tools, which can copy files from the laptop to other computers on the network (to protect against your boss spilling coffee on the new laptop. and frying his only copy of some important document). There’s also some better backwards-compatibility, which could be really critical if your boss relies on some crufty old piece of 10 year old software that’s never been updated.
Wikipedia breaks it out a bit better:
Here’s what’s different between the two with my half-ass explanations:
Dynamic Disks – Lets you either combine or divide hard disks into either more or fewer drive letters. Not going to be that useful on a laptop.
Encrypting File System – Lets you encrypt folders. Useful if he’ll keep sensitive data on it.
Location Aware Printing – Changes the default printer based on what network you’re on, so you can take it home and not have to muck with it.
Presentation Mode – Something to do with hooking up a projector to it. I think it shuts down all popups and other embarassing things like your mom sending you an IM in the middle of a big presentation.
Group Policy – Lets the computer accept settings from a domain controller. Necessary if he’ll be connecting to a domain at work.
Offline Files and Folder redirection – Like location aware printers, it lets you set up certain things if you’ll be travelling a lot and/or working from multiple locations, one of which may not have a network connection.
Windows Server domain joining – The domain I mentioned prior. If he’ll just be logging in as “steve” with a simple password, this isn’t necessary. If he’ll be logging in as “steve.companyuser” or something official, it’s probably gonna need this.
Windows XP Mode – Can run apps as XP. Not sure of the specifics.
Software Restriction Policies – I think this goes along with group policy stuff.
Interesting. We are a very small office, no network really. No IT department, frankly. It sounds like he’d be able to get away with Home Premium, although the Location Aware Printing would be awesome to have. I wonder if that alone is available on a black market somewhere.
(I keed. Please don’t disappear me, Microsoft Masters.)
Never get Home for a business. You cant join a domain and do a bazillion other things common in a business. Even if youre not a sophisticated shop, you’ll reget it if the business grows or if things change.
Also business allows remote desktop, which is a life saver if you need to do remote support.
Some software won’t run on Windows home , SAS is 1 example.
BTW, in the US Home premium is the only home version.
Good points, all. I would be more comfortable if we had Pro because it gives us more options. But the boss… well… he’s…uh…
Ok, he’s cheap. He’d run the Student version if he thought he could save some money.
As it happens, I had to upgrade my copy of Windows 7 Home Premium to Windows 7 Professional just so that I could download and install Microsoft’s Virtual PC and XP mode (which together give you the capability to run a virtual copy of Windows XP in a window on your Win7P desktop - my ancient FORTRAN compiler wouldn’t install under Windows 7 but did install in this virtual XP machine). Read this thread if you want to read the gory details.
The good news is that if you think you can get away with Windows 7 Home Premium but aren’t 100% positive, you can purchase your PC with Windows Home Premium and later use Microsoft’s “anytime upgrade” feature to upgrade your OS to Windows 7 Professional in about ten minutes for $90(US) plus tax. That’s what I did. I don’t think you can do that if you start with the “student edition”, though.
Yeah, I think that’s what I’ll do.
As an aside, you don’t need Windows 7 Pro to do this if you have a retail copy of XP. I am running XP/Virtual PC on Vista Home Premium. It is useful for running 16 bit programs (non DOS, I use DOSBox for that) on 64bit Vista.
Good point. I didn’t, so that (free) version of XP contained in the XP Mode download came in very handy.
Well you can always upgrade to business, and since it’s a business expense that is deductable.
Plus there are ways of doing things. If your boss is gonna be that cheap, he might be better off running Linux and hiring a college kid to set it up.
I’m not kidding, in 2003 I was doing pretty good with my computer business, till about a year later, suddenly I’m getting competition from college kids, taking computer classes and charging $10/hr 