The Many Versions of Windows
Unlike Windows XP which initially launched with only the Home and Professional versions, Microsoft is coming out of the gate with numerous different versions of Vista to target different market segments. There's a lot to talk about, so let's first take a look at the different versions, their prices, and their features:
All things considered, as the most stripped down version of Windows available to consumers, Home Basic is not really an option as too much is removed for it to be truly useful to a lot of people. While Aero Glass tends to be as much eye-candy as it is a useful feature, it does serve its purposes. This leaves most users to pick from Home Premium, Business, and Ultimate.
Given the price of the Ultimate edition of Vista - higher than any previous version of Windows - it's hard to recommend it right off the bat. For anyone that needs every last feature on a computer there's really no other option, but otherwise there's a lot of money to be saved by skipping out on a feature or two that may never get used. BitLocker is the only feature that the Ultimate edition has that no other edition has, but given it requires a Trusted Platform Module to be used - which few computers have - on its own it won't sell many copies of Ultimate. Microsoft has also released at least one other Ultimate Extra, but again most people won't want to spend the extra money for a poker game.
As for the Home Premium and Business editions, our best guess would be that it will be the Business edition that becomes the enthusiast standard like XP Professional was before it. Media Center is still an application better suited for use with a TV, whereas Business comes with Previous Versions and Remote Desktop, the latter of which is largely responsible for selling enthusiasts on XP Professional over XP Home. However, Microsoft has done a fairly good job here of splitting features between the two to entice users into buying the Ultimate edition. Business lacks the Parental Controls functionality and Home Premium lacks Previous Versions, and the only way to get both is to grab the Ultimate edition. In short, picking the right version of Vista will be about compromises, either giving up features you may want or giving up more money in order to get everything. Microsoft has also indicated that users will be able to purchase incremental upgrades to Vista, so if you start at Home Basic you may be able to upgrade to Premium and eventually Ultimate over time. Details about what upgrades will be allowed as well as the upgrade prices are not yet finalized.
It's on this note that the issue of piracy comes up, as it's a poorly kept secret that Windows XP Professional was easily and quickly pirated due to there being a version for large businesses that used volume license keys. Microsoft has since then rectified the situation somewhat with the Windows Genuine Advantage system for alerting users who are using pirated copies and locking them out of various Microsoft services like Windows Update, but nonetheless XP was fundamentally easily broken in terms of anti-piracy features. So far however this does not appear to be the case for Vista, as Microsoft has done away with VLK in favor of requiring activation on all copies, with the Enterprise version of Business using a keyserver. The lack of an immediately piratable version of Vista will undoubtedly slow its adoption compared to XP, and the Business versions' popularity will not be as lopsided.
We've also had several questions since our initial articles about what can be done with legitimate versions of Windows given that Vista has better activation controls than XP. Among other poorly kept secrets, it's known that Microsoft did not stick to the End User License Agreement for XP very well for OEM copies - while the EULA for an OEM copy of XP made it clear that it was for installation on a single machine only and tied to that machine (or rather its motherboard) for the rest of time, Microsoft has been letting XP users reactivate anyhow without trouble. As a result users who had purchased OEM copies of XP back in 2001 have continued to reuse it up through today, which is an excellent deal for them given the low price of the OEM versions spread over 5 years. While the EULA has not changed for Vista as far as this policy goes, there have been concerns and rumors that Microsoft will be clamping down on this practice.
To be fair, we have no way to predict exactly what Microsoft will do here. It's possible they will continue this policy, but that's not a good enough answer as they can change it at any time given that they control the activation system for Vista. Simply put, the only way to be sure that a purchased copy of Vista will be transferable to a new computer is to get a retail version, either as an upgrade or a full version. Going with an OEM version may work now, but it will always be a gamble on if/when Microsoft will clamp down on transfers.
The retail upgrade versions also deserve a quick disclaimer here about how they have changed since XP. Previously you only needed to prove ownership of a previous version of Windows to use an upgrade disc for a clean install, which was as easy as inserting the disc for an older version of Windows. According to Microsoft's own notes this is no longer the case; Vista upgrades work as upgrades only and a previous version of Windows must be fully installed and activated to let the upgrade install. As this requires a user to effectively install two operating systems if they have an upgrade disc, this is not a welcome change - new installations will take much longer now as the gains made by Vista's new image-based installer will be offset by the slow installation procedures for old versions of Windows. This change is a fundamentally poor decision by Microsoft. A workaround has already been found, but it still requires installing Vista twice.
Unlike Windows XP which initially launched with only the Home and Professional versions, Microsoft is coming out of the gate with numerous different versions of Vista to target different market segments. There's a lot to talk about, so let's first take a look at the different versions, their prices, and their features:
| Windows Vista Prices | |||
| Retail | Upgrade | OEM | |
| Home Basic | $200 | $100 | $100 |
| Home Premium | $240 | $160 | $120 |
| Business | $300 | $200 | $150 |
| Ultimate | $400 | $250 | $200 |
| Windows Vista Feature Comparison | ||||
| Home Basic | Home Premium | Business | Ultimate | |
| Aero Glass | X | X | X | |
| Mobility Center | X | X | X | |
| Meeting Space | X | X | X | |
| Media Center | X | X | ||
| Parental Controls | X | X | X | |
| Previous Versions | X | X | ||
| Remote Desktop | X | X | ||
| BitLocker | X | |||
All things considered, as the most stripped down version of Windows available to consumers, Home Basic is not really an option as too much is removed for it to be truly useful to a lot of people. While Aero Glass tends to be as much eye-candy as it is a useful feature, it does serve its purposes. This leaves most users to pick from Home Premium, Business, and Ultimate.
Given the price of the Ultimate edition of Vista - higher than any previous version of Windows - it's hard to recommend it right off the bat. For anyone that needs every last feature on a computer there's really no other option, but otherwise there's a lot of money to be saved by skipping out on a feature or two that may never get used. BitLocker is the only feature that the Ultimate edition has that no other edition has, but given it requires a Trusted Platform Module to be used - which few computers have - on its own it won't sell many copies of Ultimate. Microsoft has also released at least one other Ultimate Extra, but again most people won't want to spend the extra money for a poker game.
As for the Home Premium and Business editions, our best guess would be that it will be the Business edition that becomes the enthusiast standard like XP Professional was before it. Media Center is still an application better suited for use with a TV, whereas Business comes with Previous Versions and Remote Desktop, the latter of which is largely responsible for selling enthusiasts on XP Professional over XP Home. However, Microsoft has done a fairly good job here of splitting features between the two to entice users into buying the Ultimate edition. Business lacks the Parental Controls functionality and Home Premium lacks Previous Versions, and the only way to get both is to grab the Ultimate edition. In short, picking the right version of Vista will be about compromises, either giving up features you may want or giving up more money in order to get everything. Microsoft has also indicated that users will be able to purchase incremental upgrades to Vista, so if you start at Home Basic you may be able to upgrade to Premium and eventually Ultimate over time. Details about what upgrades will be allowed as well as the upgrade prices are not yet finalized.
It's on this note that the issue of piracy comes up, as it's a poorly kept secret that Windows XP Professional was easily and quickly pirated due to there being a version for large businesses that used volume license keys. Microsoft has since then rectified the situation somewhat with the Windows Genuine Advantage system for alerting users who are using pirated copies and locking them out of various Microsoft services like Windows Update, but nonetheless XP was fundamentally easily broken in terms of anti-piracy features. So far however this does not appear to be the case for Vista, as Microsoft has done away with VLK in favor of requiring activation on all copies, with the Enterprise version of Business using a keyserver. The lack of an immediately piratable version of Vista will undoubtedly slow its adoption compared to XP, and the Business versions' popularity will not be as lopsided.
We've also had several questions since our initial articles about what can be done with legitimate versions of Windows given that Vista has better activation controls than XP. Among other poorly kept secrets, it's known that Microsoft did not stick to the End User License Agreement for XP very well for OEM copies - while the EULA for an OEM copy of XP made it clear that it was for installation on a single machine only and tied to that machine (or rather its motherboard) for the rest of time, Microsoft has been letting XP users reactivate anyhow without trouble. As a result users who had purchased OEM copies of XP back in 2001 have continued to reuse it up through today, which is an excellent deal for them given the low price of the OEM versions spread over 5 years. While the EULA has not changed for Vista as far as this policy goes, there have been concerns and rumors that Microsoft will be clamping down on this practice.
To be fair, we have no way to predict exactly what Microsoft will do here. It's possible they will continue this policy, but that's not a good enough answer as they can change it at any time given that they control the activation system for Vista. Simply put, the only way to be sure that a purchased copy of Vista will be transferable to a new computer is to get a retail version, either as an upgrade or a full version. Going with an OEM version may work now, but it will always be a gamble on if/when Microsoft will clamp down on transfers.
The retail upgrade versions also deserve a quick disclaimer here about how they have changed since XP. Previously you only needed to prove ownership of a previous version of Windows to use an upgrade disc for a clean install, which was as easy as inserting the disc for an older version of Windows. According to Microsoft's own notes this is no longer the case; Vista upgrades work as upgrades only and a previous version of Windows must be fully installed and activated to let the upgrade install. As this requires a user to effectively install two operating systems if they have an upgrade disc, this is not a welcome change - new installations will take much longer now as the gains made by Vista's new image-based installer will be offset by the slow installation procedures for old versions of Windows. This change is a fundamentally poor decision by Microsoft. A workaround has already been found, but it still requires installing Vista twice.
Facebook
Twitter
RSS
105 Comments
View All Comments
Ryan Smith - Saturday, February 3, 2007 - link
That's up to Vista, it benchmarks a flash drive to make sure it's fast enough to be effectively used as a ReadyBoost cache. If ReadyBoost won't engage, then your drive isn't passing one(or more) of their tests.mlambert890 - Friday, February 2, 2007 - link
How is the PC hemmhoraging marketshare to the Mac? You've got to be kidding. Their marketshare in 06 rose from a pathetic 4.4 to a somewhat less pathetic 4.8. Thats with ALL of their ridiculous hype, ALL of the asskissing from the press (including you guys now I guess?) and ALL of the armies of lunatic "Mac priests" that pollute every forum.Its hillarious that you would position this tiny growth in a share that declined steadily for 22 years until it hit rock bottom at like 3% in 2003 as a "hemmhorage". I have to wonder why you would characterize it that way. To be honest, it reeks of bias.
quanta - Friday, February 2, 2007 - link
Think about it, ReadyBoost is treated by Vista as random access memory, to store temoprary contents than can change very often. Considering typical USB flash drive only has 100k write cycle, you will need to replace it very soon. Worse yet, when the flash drive is gone, so will your critical data at the worst possible time. With the hardware requirement of Vista, no amount of wear levelling is going to help.Ryan Smith - Friday, February 2, 2007 - link
No, this is wrong.ReadyBoost is a write-through data cache handled by the SuperFetch system; when enabled SuperFetch uses it as another cache location optimized for small files. Based on the information we've seen, it's used primarily to store DLLs and other static and semi-static data that is needed an intermediate amount of time(not important enough to spend valuable RAM, important enough to cache), with highly dynamic data sent to SuperFetch or the hard disk to avoid unnecessary wear out. It will most certainly put wear on flash memory, but it seems unlikely that it will put 51TB of write-wear(the amount of data that needs to be written on a 512MB flash card to write over all bits 100k times) before several years out.
Of course, this is as according to Microsoft. We don't really know what exactly is being stored on a ReadyBoost drive at any given moment, however we have no reason to believe that Microsoft isn't really taking efforts to minimize writes. We'll find out if/when flash memory starts wearing out.
mlambert890 - Friday, February 2, 2007 - link
We'll see. Please remember that the 100k write cycle is an average, that the flash is used as a small cache only, and that write leveling of COURSE will help before making assumptions.Ive been beating up flash for YEARS thats still going. There are moves to literally put OS's on flash based hard drives. Hybrid drives already use the same concept as ReadyBoost (and are also supported on Vista).
Using flash as a cache for magnetic media is not some untested concept that is going to lead to global data destruction.
MS must have really destroyed their mindshare that so many armchair scientists are just fully willing to believe that theyve figured out ALL the stuff that the "idiots" in Redmond dont realize. Give a little credit to the armies of PhDs that work on at least the basic concept for this crap. Maybe implementation gets flawed by the realities of release cycles and budgets, but BASIC CONCEPT is typically sound.
dugbug - Friday, February 2, 2007 - link
UAC is like a firewall -- chatty at first (during installs and configurations), but once you have set up your system you will hardly ever hear from it. This should be obvious to the authors.And for that matter, the 6-operation file delete they discuss in the beginning was for deleting a file on a shared desktop (meaning a delete was for all users). This is commonplace for enterprise and workplace users, it should be no surprise that a file used by others would require permissions to delete. Though Im glad the number of operations was greatly reduced.
As to the comments about vista being sluggish? Perhaps it is RAM? I have 2Gb and vista runs without any slowdown at all. Once you use it for a while you won't go back to XP.
-d
LoneWolf15 - Friday, February 2, 2007 - link
Untrue. Enthusiasts use lots of things like the Control Panel, MMC console, etc. and these all require UAC every time. Currently, I also have startup programs on my beta-test box that UAC blocks. This would be fine, if UAC had a feature saying "Yes, I know what this program is, let it run every time all the time" and be done. But, UAC doesn't have this option, so a user has to allow the program to run every single freaking time they boot their machine.I've tried changing the program properties so that it runs as Administrator; that hasn't solved the problem. I turned off UAC, which gives me a lovely annoying red-X shield in the system tray that every so often decides to warn me with a popup balloon that UAC is turned off and I could be in danger, so it's annoying even when turned off, and there's no easy way around it. Enthusiasts do a lot with their computers, and what they do is likely to increase their number of UAC prompts. Bottom line: Unlike OS X's methods, Vista's UAC happens far more often, and is far more annoying. And because it doesn't require a password (like OS X) and is just a click-through, I'll put money down that within a year, it will be worthless, as the average user will learn to click through it without reading a single bit of info.
funk3y - Sunday, February 4, 2007 - link
The red cross can also be disabled for sure; on my computer, which is a member of a domain I recieve no error message at all, even if UAC & co are disabled.haplo602 - Friday, February 2, 2007 - link
Realy. What's the hype all about ?SuperFetch - trivial change to caching mechanisms. Anybody that would require it would have already implemented it in *NIX systems. This is a purely desktop user feature to hid some processing overhead. There's nothing new about this that would prevent implementation in w2k already except MS incompetence ...
ReadyBoost - So the new standard is to have a permanently attached USB stick to have some performance ?
Compund TCP, Receive window auto tuning - I laughed like mad. So they finaly made a proper implementation of something network related? End even then Vista is SLOWER. I'd suggest take a stand-alone NIC that Vista nad XP have drivers for themselves and test it. Should rule out driver bugs.
I/O improvements - so I make an app that makes a high priority high capacity I/O operation (say 1GB) and you can go for lunch till the system is anyway usable. Seriously. I/O in small chunks makes perfect sense in multitasking environments since you have more entry point and can adjust the stream on OS level and tune performance. That XP or Vista are stupid enough to do this is their fault. I guess MS will hype this as the next best thing in a future OS ?
All in All every feature hyped in the article does not deserve a Marketing Name(tm) because it is a normal concept. So we have a shiny new bigger and slower OS that is hiding this behind hyped features. F.E. memory compression could very much improve system performance without relying on external devices (ReadyBoost).
mlambert890 - Friday, February 2, 2007 - link
Just admit your bias man. There is NOTHING MS could do that would cause you to give them kudos. I spend my days arguing with guys like you for a living (unfortunately) and its just exhausting.I could point you to REAMS of documentation of all the crap that has been rewritten and overhauled in Vista, but whats the point? You want to hate it so hate it.
Its sad that technology debates are STILL religion for so many after all this time :(