As you know, Windows 7 available in a total of six different editions: Starter, Home Basic, Home Premium, Professional, Enterprise and Ultimate editions. Starter and Home Basic editions aren’t available in retail stores and they ship with PCs in select regions only And the Enterprise edition is only available for Enterprises.
Windows 7 Home Premium vs Professional vs Ultimate editions
So, end users need to choose between Home Premium, Professional, and Ultimate editions. As the name suggests, the Home Premium is designed for home users, the Professional one is for professionals who need advanced features such as remote desktop and location aware printing. The Ultimate edition is for users for users who need or who would like to have every feature present in Windows 7.
Microsoft recently announced Windows 7 pricing and upgrade options. Now that we have Windows 7 pricing and upgrade matrix, let’s check the difference between the most wanted Windows 7 editions: Windows 7 home premium, Windows 7 Professional and Windows 7 Ultimate.
Since Windows 7 upgrade program and Windows7 pre-order program started already, you might want to check out the suitable Windows 7 edition for you.
Below is the official chart that shows you the difference between Windows Home premium, Professional, and Ultimate editions.
As you can see, location aware printing, domain join and group policy controls, remote desktop host, advanced back-up, and encrypting file system features aren’t present in the Home Premium edition and is available only in Professional and Ultimate editions. To get features such as BitLocker and BitLocker To Go, AppLocker, DirectAccess, BranchCache, and MUI language packs you need to go for the Ultimate edition.
You can always upgrade from your current Windows 7 edition to a higher edition without losing installed programs and settings. Check out our how to upgrade from Windows 7 Home Premium to Professional or Ultimate edition guide successfully upgrade to the powerful Windows 7 edition. One can also downgrade from one Windows 7 to another edition with the help of Windows 7 Downgrader tool
We also encourage you check out how to upgrade from Windows 7 to Windows 8 guide.
