Datasheet

Part I: Surviving Setup

With the exception of the Remote Desktop and Mobility Center features for portable

PCs—both of which are limited in the Home versions—most of the features of Windows

Vista are the same in all versions.

The home-oriented versions of Vista are more limited than the business versions in some

ways, but they also include some unique multimedia functionality that’s not available to

Vista Business and Enterprise users. If the restrictions of a given version prevent you from

using a feature you need in a more capable version, it’s easy to upgrade Vista’s Home and

Business versions to Vista Ultimate. To do so, you can use the built-in Windows Anytime

Upgrade applet (described later in this chapter and in Chapter 2).

Step 3: Making the Right Product-Edition Choice

Armed with the information in the preceding tables, you can think of Windows Vista as

being divided into three basic product types:

There are the consumer- or home-oriented versions, such as Windows Vista Home

♦

Basic and Home Premium. These products tend to include interesting digital-

One big feature you don’t get with Windows Vista Home Basic is the beautiful

Windows Aero user interface, described in detail later in the book. If you want the

absolute best graphical experience, don’t pick Home Basic. That said, you might

be surprised that the default Windows Vista Home Basic UI, called Windows

Vista Standard, is pretty decent. You can ﬁ nd out more about this and other

Vista UIs in Chapter 4.

Though 32-bit versions of Windows Vista “support” 4GB of RAM, they can

access only about 3.1GB of RAM, even when a full 4GB of RAM is installed in

the PC. This is because of a limitation in the way that 32-bit versions of Windows

handle memory access. If you were to install an x64 version of Windows Vista

on the same system, you would have access to the entire 4GB of RAM. 64-bit

Vista versions have dramatically improved memory capacity, as noted in the

preceding tables.

Regarding that 128GB address space on Windows Vista Business, Enterprise, and

Ultimate, it’s a moving target and could, in fact, go up in the years ahead. When

Microsoft ﬁ rst shipped Windows Vista, a PC with 128GB was almost science ﬁ c-

tion. It still is today, frankly, but as PC and workstation makers make ever more

powerful machines, it’s possible that one will eventually cross the 128GB-of-RAM

barrier during Windows Vista’s lifetime. If that happens, Microsoft will evaluate

increasing the memory limit in x64 versions of Vista Business, Enterprise, and

Ultimate.

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