Windows Vista Product Editions Revealed

13 Sep, 2005 at 12:22pm ET Article published in Tech

If you’ve been wondering why Windows Vista has taken a long time to reach Beta 1, we can now tell you why: there are seven separate editions of Vista headed your way.

First up, there’s Starter Edition, which like XP Starter Edition, is a crippled (and lame) product aimed at the two-thirds world. It will limit users to three concurrent applications, and provide only basic TCP/IP networking, and won’t be suitable for most games. The next step up is Home Basic Edition, which is really the sibling to today’s Windows XP Home. However, as the name suggests, there’s also Home Premium Edition, and this is where we start to split features like hairs and create a gaggle of products. HPE will build on the the Basic Edition by adding, most notably, the next-generation of Media Center capabilities, including support for HDTV, DVD authoring, and even DVD ripping backed up (of course) by Windows DRM. For non-corporate types, this is probably going to be the OS that most people use. It’s similar to XP Pro in power, but with all of the added bells and whistles for entertainment. Well, most of them.

Submitted by: Kwitko

Source: Arstechnica

Comments

13 Sep 2005 ~ 4:49pm GHoosdum Wow.. 7 editions.
13 Sep 2005 ~ 5:25pm airbornflght hmmm...windows Vista Home Premium Edition...thats a mouthfull. im thinking maybe $500..maybe more. I'll stick with XP
13 Sep 2005 ~ 5:26pm Cyclonite Stupid...
13 Sep 2005 ~ 5:51pm Linc This is going to be a technical support nightmare. It's bad enough trying to support two versions, plus ME, 2K, and 98 in a campus environment like where I work. We're actually dropping ME and 98 support at the end of the year, but this is going to be ridiculous

For a campus, you will want the multimedia aspects of a home edition with the networking capabilities of a pro edition, and I guarantee they won't be able to afford Ultimate.
13 Sep 2005 ~ 5:56pm edcentric w2k
it still works for me
15 Sep 2005 ~ 10:43am deicist Obvious reaosn for doing this, seperate out the corporate licensed versions (which don't require activation and are thus easier to pirate) from the features that home users / gamers will want.

Microsoft thinking 'This will stop piracy, and our plans for world domination can continue. Mwahahahaha'

Everyone elses thinking 'damn, I'll have to wait an extra couple of days til someone cracks the activation on the ultimate edition'
15 Sep 2005 ~ 12:08pm TheBaron yeah pretty much. I'm hoping that UT will offer Ultimate for $5 like they do with XP Pro, if they don't I just won't upgrade
15 Sep 2005 ~ 9:45pm Qeldroma It's all about the money. Period.

I see maybe $50 USD for Starter which may only run Office Standard, Solitaire, and a photo show.

Then maybe $3K (? no one knows yet) for Ultimate which, of course, is the only one that will have everything you want.

Maybe $100 and a subscription fee for ??? version? Kah-Ching!

A lot of people are professional Sys Admins and/or programmers who like playing WoW or BF2, etc. Then there are those who just love to tinker, OC, etc., etc. People like this are are going more for which version?

Windows XP Pro - There may have been a lot of issues with it but there is a saying going through my mind-

"Don't it always seem to go that you don't know what you've got 'til it's gone."

And the funny thing is (I've read an article in Maximum PC), I don't see one thing in Vista that I need right now. It's nice, but - we NEED it why?

I'm a little tired of Microsoft telling us what we need or how it should work and if it is like this ... well, I hope we use the votes in our wallets wisely (like for something else).
18 Sep 2005 ~ 9:55pm Tim I've got my Windows 2000 Pro and Windows XP Home computers running pretty good right now, I don't think I'll be switching anything over to Windows Vista. What can it do for me that my computers can't do right now? I'll look at it on demonstration computers in stores, but that'll probably be it for a while for me.