The Home Basic version of the product is designed for people who use their PCs for general email and web use. This version of the product will undoubtedly be the cheapest, but probably not the most popular. However, it will probably be the version that most OEM manufacturers ship with their lower end computers. The customer always has the option to upgrade to a higher power version.
- Pricing for the Home Basic edition is $199/$99 for an upgrade
Next up, and probably the most popular version, is the Home Premium edition. This has the new Aero Glass visual schemes (which has the ability to use DirectX10 compatible graphics cards to create a very pretty transparent interface), and has the equivalent abilities of both Windows XP Media Center 2005, and Tablet PC 2005.
Home Premium will also include some additional software, from video editing and DVD creation software to the ability to watch HDTV on your computer. This will also be the only version - besides Ultimate - that has Xbox 360 extender functionality.
- Pricing for the Home Premium edition is $239/$159 for an upgrade
Windows Vista Business, although likely to be popular with companies of smaller sizes, is unlikely to be the version that most Corporates use. It has access to the Aero UI features, as well as BitLocker drive encryption (which uses the TPM 1.2 chip now shipping in some laptops to create a fully encrypted drive, the benefit of which is the system is then hardware accelerated, resulting in low performance overheads). The other differences between this version and the Home editions is the inclusion of new virtualisation technologies that both Intel and AMD are now including in their newer CPUs and Chipsets. These allow users to have hardware acceleration inside software like VirtualPC and VMWare. The other important thing in this version is the new and improved deployment technologies, and the support for world wide languages right out of the box.
Windows Vista Enterprise will ship to companies with a Microsoft Enterprise Agreement or Software Assurance agreement, and is not available "off the shelf". This has all the same features as Business, but the licensing model is more aligned to the corporate user.
- Pricing for the Vista Business edition is $299/$199 for an upgrade
Then there's Windows Vista Ultimate edition.
Article comments
1 - Heather Ames
Great article, Ashleigh. Very informative. I at last feel like I have a grip on Vista's capabilities.
2 - Jet in Columbus
Ashleigh, I'd considered doing an article on this a few months back, but they kept changing requirements and capabilities and I figured by the time I finished researching it, it'd be outdated information.
Having said that, you presented a lot of useful info here. I personally have Internet explorer 7.0's final version and also I LOVE Window's hassle free Defender adn the newest media player.
I'd like to stress something here though. wait till you need a new computer and buy it preloaded.
With the new system requirements, the minimums aren't really going to cut it and to try to load Vista on a machine that's more than two years old in my opinion is folly, and it's better to buy one that's already configured and equiped (especially the 64x)to run it already.
Nicely done
Jet