Vista ultimate or premium?
I have xp pro on one of my machines and want to change to vista but I want to know if premium is worth it or should I go with ultimate? I have ultimate on my main machine and love it. My only reason is that I have a vista home premium disc that I have and it is fully legal but was wondering what the main difference would be. I seem to find it is very similar except for remote desktop which I think is important because I am networked. What would you do?
I say leave it with WinXP Pro. I have avoided Vista like the plague.
I have so far "downgraded" two machines from Vista to WinXP. Although Windows calls it a downgrade, I think of it as an upgrade. WinXP takes far less resources and is faster.
That is your loss I guess. I have not had one problem with vista 64bit and have had it for over 8 months now. I love it and hate going to my xp machine any more. It has so many quirks even after fresh reinstalls etc. I work on a lot of xp machines and they all have an issue of some sort.
I agree with you about Vista. I've been running x64 Home Premium on my desktop and x86 version on my laptop for quite some time now and couldn't go back. My work laptop and other machines are XP pro etc. and they just feel old and superceded when I use them. I find Vista more reliable now too.
To try to answer your question, I personally would go with the Premium version if you already have it. Some of the main additional features you will get with the ultimate version are below (although there a lot of others that you will probably never need) -
support for >16GB of RAM - unlikely you will need that!
support for 2 CPU's
file system encryption
drive encryption (Bitlocker)
Virtual PC Express
Windows Ultimate Extras
Windows Fax and Scan
wireless network provisioning
joining network Domains
Remote Desktop Host and Client - Home Premium has R.D. Client support only
Group Policy support
offline files and folders support
can install IIS
As I said, there are many others and I suggest that you read up on them. If any of the extras you get with Ultimate are worth the cost of a new copy of Ultimate then buy it - otherwise stick with the Premium. Unless you are in a business-type environment, Premium should be more than adequate. Things like Remote Desktop hosting can be gotten around by using something like VNC instead.
That's my tuppence worth, anyway.
Buff
Agreed, I have been using some form of Vista since the Beta trials. Currently using the Ultimate versions, 64 bit on my main system and dual booting XP and the 32 bit version on my other system. I'm mainly sticking with the XP version to keep in practice for when I do service work. It might not be perfect, but I like it over XP.
As to your question, if I hadn't been given my versions of Ultimate my needs would have been satisfied with Premium. I don't really use many of the Ultimate features.
Not sure if anyone has seen this little ploy by Micosoft (http://www.dailytech.com/Microsoft+Tricks+Diehard+XP+Users+Into+Liking+Vista+with+Mojave+Ruse/article12509.htm) but it seems to have worked for some.
I have Vista on two machines - one (laptop) 32 bit and one 64 bit. They work perfectly and I have never had any problems with them. I have one machine running XP Pro only because I don't feel a need to upgrade some of the hardware yet to be compatible with Vista.
A 4th machine is not running any form of Windows since it is running a flavor or Linux called ipcop and it never gives me problems.
Mark H; Why do I have 4 computers?