First, I agree the decision is between Home Premium and Ultimate. Business is not designed for multimedia and Basic is exactly that.
* The 'protect against hardware failure' feature is basically the same as Norton Ghost or Acronis TrueImage, if you are familiar with either of those third-party programs. In essence, it lets you create an exact duplicate copy of your hard drive so that if your drive crashes you can restore from the backup and pick up exactly where you left off, installed software and all. XP had no equivalent, though third-party offerings are bountiful. This is available in Vista Business and Ultimate only. Home Premium, however, does let you backup individual file types (text documents, pictures, etc.), just not the entire hard drive.
* Remote Desktop is used for logging into a computer remotely...you see your own desktop, can open/close the CD-ROM drives, etc. It's not necessary to access files, though, from other computers in your home. You can network the machines through a router and, provided you set the permissions such that one can access the other, manipulate files at will.
* 'Better protect your data' is simply a new feature in Vista Enterprise and Ultimate called BitLocker, which is where you can encrypt your entire hard drive. At this point the technology remains 'uncracked'...there is no program you can download to circumvent it. This is primarily aimed at laptop users at risk of losing the notebook. Unless you are worried about someone breaking in, stealing the computer, and reading your data it's not necessary.
In short, you could pick up a copy of Norton Save & Restore, Norton Ghost, or Acronis TrueImage for $30 (or less) on sale and be satisfied with Vista Home Premium, not missing out on anything that would greatly impact you.
Hope this helps,
John
I'm looking into getting a new laptop, but I'm having a hard time deciding which version is going to work best for me.
What I will be using it for:
This one won't really be for word processing and things like that. But, that can be done on most any computer, so that really isn't an issue. I would like to be able to do photo editing, using Photoshop Elements (the basic program, not the really big, advanced one) internet, listening to music, etc. The biggest thing is that I like to do more than one thing at a time. For example, I like to edit my photos and listen to my Podcasts in iTunes and also surf the internet, so being able to do that is really important.
My situation:
Basic is definitely not what I'm looking at. I'm at least going to get Premium, I'm just trying to decide if upgrading to Ultimate is worth it. On the laptop I'm looking at it is is about $100 more.
My question:
Basically I'm trying to decide how good the extra features are in Ultimate and if they are worth it. I have a brochure that has a chart of the features. It says the extras in Ultimate are "Help to protect against hardware failure" "Business networking and remote desktop" "Better protect your data"
Protecting against hardware failure: Is this really better than what XP offers? Does Premium offer anything like this? I won't be using it for business, but photos and things like that. So I guess it isn't as important as a business computer, but I still don't want to lose it.
Remote desktop: I will have this notebook in another area of my house. On ocassion I may need something from my other laptop, would this work for that? My old laptop has XP home on it, so I'm not sure if that would work or how I would do this.
Finally, how does the better data protection work?
So basically my question is how well these three features work and if they will work for me?
Also, in your opinion, if these three features are worth an additonal $100 or if the money would be better spent elsewhere.
Thanks so much!
Chowhound
Comic Vine
GameFAQs
GameSpot
Giant Bomb
TechRepublic