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.
Facebook
Twitter
RSS
207 Comments
View All Comments
Tewt - Monday, November 2, 2009 - link
Toms pretty much had the same conclusion as Anandtech. Here is a quote from their conclusion:"From the benchmarker’s standpoint, the change from Windows Vista to Windows 7 is simply a matter of documentation."
I wish someone would quantify the "snappy" feeling or the "it feels faster" they get from Windows 7 because I'm not seeing a compelling reason to move from Vista from either article on the two sites.
werfu - Monday, October 26, 2009 - link
I absolutely love Win7. I've installed the RC on my Thinkpad T61p and it's a real pleasure to use it compared to Vista. It's more responsive, not like Vista sluggish experience. However, the ACPI driver for the T61p don't work right. The screen doesn't dim and power management don't work right. I think that's really odd, as it's been working right under Vista and Linux.Also, I wonder if the NAS test was done using a Large Packet enabled NAS. It do make a huge difference on networking gear that support it.
strikeback03 - Monday, October 26, 2009 - link
Have you checked for updated drivers recently? Lenovo had a bunch of Win7 drivers for my T43 which were all dated within the past week.7Enigma - Monday, October 26, 2009 - link
Did you happen to do any benchmarking or "general user responsiveness" when you upgraded the systems? I have upgraded 3 systems since Windows 95 and in every case I ended up reformatting and doing a clean install; not because of a hardware/software issue, but rather because some unknown demon made the systems chug.I've seen this same issue with the move from XP SP2 to SP3 on my dad's computer (in this case to the point where we actually rolled back to SP2). In that instance it is possible the extra security features/etc. on an older system that just couldn't take it, but in the other instances it seemed to be a major problem.
Any comments by the authors would be greatly appreciated.
Ryan Smith - Monday, October 26, 2009 - link
One of the systems that I did the upgrade install on was my personal system. I'm not going to publish any numbers since they aren't rigorous enough, but before and after testing didn't reveal any differences in performance. It continues to perform just as well as any other Win7 system I have.7Enigma - Tuesday, October 27, 2009 - link
Thank you for the response Ryan. Honestly while the articles are fantastic, it is the timely comments from the authors that make this site the best.Postoasted - Monday, October 26, 2009 - link
Had been using XP64 for about 4 years and lived through all its teething problems. Had been totally satisfied except that with some programs it couldn't regulate the RAM efficiently. I have 6 gigs of RAM and would ofter run out while using some apps. With 7 Ultimate I can watch an H264 movie, have FF open and encode a movie all at the same time and have RAM left over. For me Windows 7 was the fix.nafhan - Monday, October 26, 2009 - link
I'll go out on a limb and say that anyone who feels comfortable configuring POP3/SMTP settings would also be comfortable downloading the free mail client from MS (or Thunderbird, etc.). Businesses will likely have MS Office installed (including Outlook). Non-technical users generally use webmail.So, the only group I can come up with who would want it installed by default is tech-savvy users without Office, that prefer MS's free desktop client over webmail, and don't have admin rights to install it themselves or access to IT support to install it for them.
jay401 - Monday, October 26, 2009 - link
Gary - Whatever happened to the P55 motherboard reviews and round-up articles you mentioned last month? Are they still on the way? I think we've seen 3 or 4 P55 motherboards reviewed so far at Anandtech. Are you still going to review the others?It's not so much the performance that's important or unknown, since they're all relatively similar. It's the technical specs comparisons, the board layout images and commentary, any issues you experienced while testing with them, etc. Would love to see the round-ups.
Gary Key - Monday, October 26, 2009 - link
They are coming shortly. We went back and purchased 8 retail boards to do additional testing on the Foxconn socket compared to the Lotes/Tyco Amp. I have finished that testing and guess what, no changes on air or water, plus it appears the revised Foxconn socket is certainly working better, not perfect, but much better.