[Liqourice]

I've seen the major difference between these two but is the difference in price worth the advantages Professional has?

[IvanV]

Well, that would depend on whether you are going to use the new features. I have the Professional edition, but looking at the official comparison chart, I'd say that I could easily manage without all three things that Home Premium lacks:

- XP mode which I have installed, but haven't had a use for;
- ability to log on to a domain, which I may see myself using in some working from home scenario, but that's not too likely;
- network backup, which may be interesting option, considering the sizes of modern HDDs - backup every home PC to another one in the network and, unless more than one fails at the same time, you're covered; still, I think that I'm too lazy for that.

[RoyBatty]

Depends, If you need the extra features it is worth, otherwise it's not. I think that most home users don't need anything above the Home Premium and buy the higher editions just to have another "Ultimate" among all these "Extreme" and "Ultra" in their rig profiles

[Liqourice]

That's about what I figured as well. THe only thing that appealed to me was encryption but there are other ways to do that anyway if necessary.

Home premium it is...

[orion_star]

The only reason I have professional is because I got it free through my university, otherwise I would have bought Home Premium. I have not used any of it's additional features, it was simply the only win 7 I could pick from.

[Judas]

Professional has a good use for those that require the windows xp mode

[Liqourice]

Well, I ended up with Home Premium. Won't install XP, not unless I see the need for it. Will install Linux though...

[mkk]

I've been rolling with Ultimate but will install fresh with Home Premium eventually because there's simply nothing I will miss from moving down. Primarily I thought it would be cool to be able to switch between Swedish and English languages through the language packs, but when doing so I noticed that in Win7 the language switch resets a lot of interface settings every time so that was no fun. (I would mostly switch language temporarily to check something out or snap screenshots with the swedish interface.) Bitlocker encryption is probably great for companies but to me it was less convenient than other alternatives like for instance the free TrueCrypt software.

And I'm not complaining really, since it's nice to have by far most users/customers doing just fine with the standard package. People have bumped into limitations with XP and Vista editions so they are initially anxious about this when asking about a Windows 7 upgrade. After having told a customer that they can rest easy then you might get to be their hero for a minute.

Edit: did an in-place downgrade by use of the simple hack listed here: http://www.mydigitallife.info/2009/1...mium-editions/ Worked just fine.

[shirtnoservice]

ive been using ultimate mostly cuz i can, theres no real reason to go to it unless like mkk said and its for businesses, i would stay with home premium

[Judas]

on machines for various companies.. i'm only installing pro on the machines when windows xp mode is required.....

I haven't had to deal with domain names which requires pro as well..

[Tipstaff]

Originally Posted by Judas

on machines for various companies.. i'm only installing pro on the machines when windows xp mode is required.....

I haven't had to deal with domain names which requires pro as well..

Same here. Professional for those that need XP Mode and Domain support, Home Premium for the rest.

[Dyre Straits]

Since I can get W7 x64 Professional OEM for $119, I don't see any reason to get anything else.