Vista Business

[als814]

It seems that through some strange loophole with the class I'm taking at my school, I am actually able to download Windows Vista Business for free. Not the real kind of free, but the free to me since I'm paying for courses here kind of free.

Anyway, my questions is would Vista Business be appropriate for my home usage, or would I really need to get Vista Home Premium/Basic? I am currently using Windows 2k, so I would need to reformat any way you look at it. The other thing I am curious about is how the hierarchy goes for Vista. Is Business higher or lower in the food chain than Home Basic?

Thanks.

[Statica]

Originally Posted by als814 Anyway, my questions is would Vista Business be appropriate for my home usage, or would I really need to get Vista Home Premium/Basic? I am currently using Windows 2k, so I would need to reformat any way you look at it. The other thing I am curious about is how the hierarchy goes for Vista. Is Business higher or lower in the food chain than Home Basic?

It really depends on what your usage is. In some ways Vista Home Premium would be higher up in the food chain than Vista Business (stuff like Parental Controls, multimedia enhancements like media center, dvd maker, movie maker HD etc etc etc), however on the other hand Vista Home Premium lacks some core networking, connectivity and security enhancements... it's pretty easy to decide what features you are looking for in an OS.
Check out: http://forum.pcmech.com/showthread.php?t=174704 for exactly what's there and what's missing. If you have any doubts about a feature post back here.

[glc]

XP Home -> Vista Home Basic
2K Pro -> XP Pro -> Vista Business
XP MCE -> Vista Home Premium

Is that a fair way of expressing it?

[Statica]

As much as I hated the idea of having all these versions when I first heard of it, I'm warming up to the idea (warming up .. not loving it .. especially from a support point of view .. I can see that one sticky of SKUs is going to be there till the next OS comes out).
I think that the split is now based on usage & environment more so than before.

Home User just going to check email and maybe the occasional surfing (the people who find budget systems under utilized) -> Home Basic
Home "SuperUser" thats going to be amidst hardcore multimedia, gaming, PC is the center of the universe -> Home Premium
Computer user in a work environment .. not exactly IT but a user -> Business
IT guy in an Enterprise role -> Enterprise
The only difference is stuff like BitLocker and languages .. it's weird that they would have this classification, but I think it might have to do more with deployment ease.
Geek / guy who has to have it all .. and we all know from XP that there are people who will opt for Pro because the feel that they need all the toys (whether they know what the toys are) -> Ultimate .. that's a bit of an exaggeration, but it's just the superset for those niché users who when they are not sitting in an SUA working with the GNU SDK .. would also like to be using the Media Center
Let's not forget that there's a starter edition in emerging markets (read: where even stores sell pirated software)

When there were 2 different OS streams before (Win9x & NT), the 9x people constantly felt that they were getting shortchanged given the significantly greater stability and tools in the NT world. This feeling of being deprived made people jump ship to the NT world (even though M$ claimed that they wanted to unify the kernel .. they still released WinME to go up against Win2k). XP Home and Pro were extremely joined at the hip, and it didn't appear that they had a clear plan of who the home user was and who the business worker was.. finally it all came down to "have $ will buy Pro". They seem to have a better separation of tracks based on utility. Of course, it has also left them open to criticism about how everything but Ultimate is crippleware.
One of the reasons why I dont like this system is that there are going to be a number of computer builders who are going to shove pricier versions down people's throats whether they need it or not and the whole experience is going to become like buying a car.

[als814]

Hey thanks for the info. One other question about Vista. Is the DRM still in place the way they were originally promising or is it toned down a lot. Like would I still be able to use limewire? I'm not sure if you're actually allowed to answer that, but whatever.