Win7 Professional vs Win7 Home Premium

beechtree

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Oct 17, 2010
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At the moment I have Win7 Professional (retail not OEM) on my older prebuilt system. I am building a new PC. I have purchased Win7 Home Premium (retail not OEM).

I'm planning on giving the kids the prebuilt system and using the homebuilt system as my gaming etc rig.

So my question is, for personal use including gaming,etc, is there really a difference between Pro and Home Premium? Should I downgrade the prebuilt to Home Premium and install Pro on the new system, or is it not worth the effort?

Additional Q: Should I install 64 bit on the new machine, why or why not?
 
Here's a comparison of what's in the different editions so that you can decide which works best for you. Aside from the difference in features, don't expect any difference in performance: http://www.winsupersite.com/win7/win7_skus_compare.asp

Use the 64-bit version if you have 4GByte of memory now, or if you think you may upgrade to 4GByte or more during the lifetime of the machine. The 32-bit version of Windows can only access about 3.5GByte of RAM or so (depending on the memory aperture of your video card).

 

Tom Kamkari

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Oct 22, 2010
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64bit allow you to see and use more ram, and it calculates faster, as mentioned the 32bit can only see and use max of 4GB total, that means lets say you have 4GB of ram and a video card that has 1GB of ram.

this means you have total of 5GB of ram, 4 from system and 1 from graphic card.

a 32bit OS will only see and use 4GB of that, in reality, 1GB is for video card, 1GB for the OS itself, so from your 5GB total, you have really like 2GB available for apps and etc, in reality its even less then that.

AS for differences between the pro and home there is very little difference, home does not offer the xp mode, remote desktop connection, and some minor features, sminlal posted a good detailed link but if you want the short version here:

have a quick look here
 
AS for differences between the pro and home there is very little difference, home does not offer the xp mode,
Assuming OP has a copy of XP he can run it on a VM on Virtual Box.

Anyways, there isn't much difference between Home and Pro. The main difference I can think of would be the ability to log in to domains. Apart from that, only Windows 7 Pro and higher can do Windows Software RAID. I'm NOT talking about FakeRAID/Hardware RAID here. I'm talking about this kind of RAID: http://www.techimo.com/articles/index.pl?photo=149
I find it quite amusing Microsoft doesn't choose to advertise this feature for Pro/Ultimate.
 

Tom Kamkari

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There is also remote desktop connection, but I guess all of that depends on which he has use for.

Also vmware for desktops cost money, not to mention having a copy of xp he can validate.

 

The difference is that Prof / Ultimate come with a license for virtual XP - without that you'd need to purchase a separate XP license.
 
Also vmware for desktops cost money, not to mention having a copy of xp he can validate.
VirtualBox is free and a really damn good VM software. There is no need to buy VMWare.

The difference is that Prof / Ultimate come with a license for virtual XP - without that you'd need to purchase a separate XP license.
True, but I'm pretty sure you can get a (valid) copy of XP pretty cheap these days.
 

verbalizer

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^+1
does the professional have bit-locker or is that just the ultimate version.?
I know that the ultimate also has windows mail, the win7 version of outlook express.
who cares really about the language packs available in ultimate..
 
One of the optional patches that was distributed via Windows Update received not too long ago was Windows Live Essentials - I chose not to install it. Perhaps that's where your copy of Windows Mail came from...?
 
My point was that if you allowed the Windows Live Essentials update to install then I'm guessing that's where your mail client came from.

You can turn off the reminders to install those updates by going to the Windows Update settings, right-clicking on the update in question, and selecting "hide".
 

verbalizer

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not me bro.
i know that i have windows mail and windows live mail..
i hope your referring to the OP.
thanks.