Datasheet

Part I: Surviving Setup

f you haven’t purchased Vista yet—or you’d like to know whether or not it’s worth

upgrading to a more capable version of Vista—this chapter is for you. A step-by-step pro-

cedure leads you through the ins and outs of selecting the right version of Vista for you.

An Overview of All the Vista Versions

Back in 2001, life was easy: Microsoft released Windows XP in just two product editions,

Windows XP Home Edition and Windows XP Professional Edition. The difference between

the products was fairly obvious; and with its enhanced feature set, XP Pro was the more

expensive version, as one might expect.

Over time, however, Microsoft muddied the waters with a wealth of new XP product

editions. Three major product editions were added: Windows XP Media Center Edition,

which received three major releases and one minor update between 2002 and 2005;

Windows XP Tablet PC Edition, which received two major releases between 2002 and

2005; and Windows XP Professional x64 Edition, which took most of XP Pro’s feature set

and brought it to the x64 hardware platform. Other XP versions, such as XP Embedded

and XP Starter Edition, can’t really be considered mainstream products because they

target specific usage scenarios and aren’t broadly available to consumers.

You may occasionally hear Vista’s versions referred to as SKUs, a term that stands for

stock keeping units. I typically use the more common terms product edition, version,

and product version throughout this book instead.

What follows is a review of the major Windows XP versions that Microsoft shipped between

2001 and 2006. In a moment, I’ll compare these products with their corresponding Vista

versions:

Windows XP Starter Edition (less-developed countries only)

♦

Windows XP Embedded (sold in embedded devices only)

♦

Most PCs sold over the past decade are 32-bit computers based on Intel’s x86

platform. While the industry was widely expected to make the jump to 64-bit

computing at some point, that leap has come from an unexpected place: Intel’s

tiny competitor AMD developed the so-called x64 platform, which is essen-

tially a 64-bit version of the aging x86 platform. x64-based PCs are completely

compatible with x86 software; and though all PCs sold today are, in fact, x64-

compatible, most PC operating systems (including Windows Vista) are sold in

32-bit versions for compatibility reasons. Even Intel is on board: Though the x64

platform was created by AMD, all of Intel’s PC-oriented microprocessors are now

x64-compatible as well.

Though not as technically elegant as so-called “native” 64-bit platforms such

as the Itanium, x64 does provide all of the beneﬁ ts of true 64-bit computing—

including, most importantly, a ﬂ at 64-bit memory address space that obliterates

the 4GB memory “ceiling” in the 32-bit world. For the purposes of this book,

when I refer to 64-bit computing, I mean x64.

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