What if you aim too low? What if you buy, Windows 7 Home Premium and decide later that you really want Windows 7 Professional? Be of good cheer. Switching versions ain't as tough as you think. Microsoft chose the feature sets assigned to each Windows 7 version with one specific goal in mind: Maximize Microsoft profits. That's why you find plenty of upgrade routes and plenty of opportunity to spend more money in the Windows Anytime Upgrade program.
All it takes is a credit card and a Windows Live ID to upgrade from Home Premium to Windows 7 Professional (or, less commonly, from Home Premium to Ultimate or from Professional to Ultimate). No, you can't downgrade and get a refund. Bonus points for thinking about it, though.
Upgrading is easy and cheap, but not as cheap as buying the version you want the first time. That's also why it's important for your financial health to get the right version from the get-go.
Windows Anytime Upgrades count as pure gravy for Microsoft: Follow the upgrade steps and Windows invites you to log on to the Internet, hand over your credit card number, and upgrade on the spot. You don't get a new box or a new CD. All you get is a new product key and a walk-through that installs the new version from media that's already in your possession. It's
pure profit for the folks in Redmond.
Narrowing the choices
You can dismiss a couple of Windows 7 versions out of hand:
Windows 7 Starter Edition: It's offered only with new PCs – typically, netbooks. If the company selling the netbook offers it with Windows 7 Home Premium, at a slightly higher price, you should take the Premium and not Starter. Why? Premium doesn't place much greater demands on the hardware, and it's packed with features you may want – including, notably, Media Center. The manufacturer should know if its netbook can handle Premium. In my experience, most can.
Windows 7 Home Basic: Even if it's available where you live, you don't want it. With no Aero Glass and no Media Center, it isn't worth the effort. A very large percentage of all copies of Windows 7 Home Basic (and Vista Starter before it) are destined to be overwritten with a pirate copy of Windows 7 Ultimate.That leaves you with Windows 7 Home Premium, unless you have a crying need to do one of the following:
Connect to a corporate network. If your company doesn't give you a copy of Windows 7 Enterprise, you need to spend the extra bucks and buy Windows 7 Professional.
Play the role of the puppet – the host – in a Remote Desktop interaction. If you're stuck with Remote Desktop, you have to buy Windows 7 Professional or Ultimate.
Many businesspeople find that LogMeIn, a free alternative to Remote Desktop, does everything they need and that Remote Desktop amounts to overkill. LogMeIn lets you access and control your home or office PC from any place that has an Internet connection. Take a look at the Web site logmein.com.
Provide added security to protect your data from prying eyes or to keep your notebook's data safe even if it's stolen. Start by determining whether you need Encrypting File System (EFS) or BitLocker or both. EFS comes with Windows 7 Professional. Ultimate has both EFS and BitLocker – with BitLocker To Go tossed in for a bit os lagniappe.
Change languages. You can change the keyboard input language in any version of Windows 7 – you can easily type Cyrillic characters, for example, on a US English copy of Windows 7. But if you want to change all the menus, all the prompts, and all the Help files to Russian or some other language, you have to buy Ultimate.
Choosing 32-Bit versus 64-Bit
If you've settled on, oh, Windows 7 Home Premium as your operating system of choice, you aren't off the hook yet. You need to decide whether you want the 32-bit flavor of Windows 7 Home Premium, or the 64-bit flavor of Windows 7 Home Premium. (Similarly, all the Windows 7 versions except Starter are available in a 32-bit model and a 64-bit model.)
Although the 32-bit and 64-bit flavors of Windows 7 look and act the same on the surface, down in the bowels of Windows, they work quite differently.
Which should you get? The question no doubt seems a bit esoteric, but there are good reasons why, oh, five or six years from now, every new PC will be using 64-bit versions of Windows.
Although lots of technical mumbo jumbo is involved, the simple fact is that programs are getting too big and Windows as we know it is running out of room. Although Windows can fake it by shuffling data on and off your hard drive, doing so slows your computer significantly.
The 32-bit flavor of Windows – the flavor that all of us were using a few years ago and most of us use now – has a limit on the amount of memory that Windows can use. Give or take a nip here and a tuck there, 32-bit Windows machines can see, at most, 3.4 or 3.5 gigabytes (GB) of memory. You can stick 4GB of memory into your computer, but in the 32-bit world, anything beyond 3.5GB is simply out of reach. It just sits there, unused.
The 64-bit flavor of Windows 7 opens up your computer's memory, so Windows can see and use more than 4GB – much more, in fact. Whether you need access to all that additional memory is debatable at this point. Five years from now, chances are pretty good that 3.5GB will start to feel a bit constraining.
There's one more good reason for running a 64-bit flavor of Windows 7: security. Microsoft enforced some strict security constraints on drivers that are used to support hardware in 64-bit machines – constraints that just couldn't be enforced in the older, more lax (and more compatible!) 32-bit environment.
And that leads to the primary problem with 64-bit Windows: drivers. Many, many people have older hardware that simply doesn't work in any 64-bit flavor of Windows. Their hardware isn't supported. Hardware manufacturers sometimes decide that it isn't worth the money to build a solid 64-bit savvy driver, to make the old hardware work with the new operating system. You, as a customer, get the short end of the stick.
To run 64-bit Windows, your computer must support 64-bit operations.
Here's an easy way to see whether your current computer can handle 64 bits: Go to Steve Gibson's SecurAble site, at grc.com/securable.htm. Follow the instructions to download and run the SecurAble program. If your computer can handle 64-bit operations, SecurAble tells you.
If you have older hardware that you want to use with your Windows 7 computer, do yourself a favor and stick with 32-bit Windows. It's unlikely that you'll start feeling the constraints of 32 bits until your current PC is long past its prime. On the other hand, if you're starting out with completely new hardware and you plan to run your current PC for a long, long
time, 64-bit Windows 7 makes a lot of sense. You may end up cursing me when an obscure driver goes bump in the night. But in the long run, you'll be better prepared for the future.