Windows 7 Ultimate costs roughly $20 more than Windows 7 Professional and users who were thinking about buying Windows 7 Professional might want to read on to find out if the extra $20 might be well invested after all (prices for the retail versions).

Please note that we are comparing Windows 7 Ultimate to Windows 7 Professional in this article. Check out our Windows 7 Home Premium article if you wish to review the differences to Windows 7 Home Premium.

Windows 7 Ultimate comes with all features of Windows 7 Professional and then some including:

• Aero glass remoting
• Windows Media Player multimedia redirection
• Audio recording over Terminal Services
• Multi-display Terminal Services
• Enterprise Search Scopes
• AppLocker
• BitLocker Drive Encryption
• BranchCache Distributed Cache
• DirectAccess
• Subsystem for Unix-based Applications
• Multilingual User Interface Pack
• Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) Enhancements
• Virtual Hard Disk Booting

Many of these features require some explanation as it might not be instantly clear what they are about:

Aero glass remoting: Aero Glass remoting provides a user experience in a remote session that is comparable to a local session [source]

Windows Media Player multimedia redirection: Windows Media Player Redirection enables content hosted in Windows Media Player to be redirected to the client for decoding on the users’ computers. This improves the quality of the video and ensures that video and audio are always in sync. This works for both full Windows Media Player and Windows Media Player controls hosted in Web pages. [source]

Enterprise Search Scopes: Enterprise Search Scopes make it easy to discover and search content on intranet portals. [source]

AppLocker: a set of Group Policy settings that evolved from Software Restriction Policies, to restrict which applications can run on a corporate network, including the ability to restrict based on the application’s version number or publisher [source]

BitLocker Drive Encryption: Contrary to the official name, BitLocker Drive Encryption is a logical volume encryption system. A volume may or may not be an entire drive, and can span one or more physical drives. Also, when enabled TPM/Bitlocker can ensure the integrity of the trusted boot path (e.g. BIOS, boot sector, etc.), in order to prevent most offline physical attacks, boot sector malware, etc. The latest version of Bitlocker, included in Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2, adds the ability to encrypt removable drives. [source]

BranchCache Distributed Cache: Decrease the time branch office users spend waiting to download files across the network. [source]

DirectAccess: Give mobile users seamless access to corporate networks without a need to VPN. [source]

Subsystem for Unix-based Applications: Subsystem for UNIX-based Applications (SUA) is a source-compatibility subsystem for compiling and running custom UNIX-based applications on a computer running a Windows server-class operating system. You can make your UNIX applications fully interoperable with Windows in SUA with little or no change to your original source code. [source]

Multilingual User Interface Pack: Create a single OS image for deployment to users worldwide. [source]

Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) Enhancements: Improved user experience for VDI with multimon and microphone support, which have the ability to reuse virtual hard drive (VHD) images to boot a physical PC. [source]

Virtual Hard Disk Booting: Capability to boot from virtual hard disks

Those are the additional features. Some of them could be quite useful for end users like the multilingual user interface or Bitlocker drive encryption. Most features on the other hand make only sense in computer networks.

Now that we have reviewed the three editions of Windows 7: Which did or would you buy and why?

It is usually not that easy to evaluate all the different editions to find a suitable one. Even users who buy a pre-build PC system should make sure that the included operating systems meets all their demands. Windows 7 Home Premium’s main advantage is its price and the fact that it offers all features that Microsoft would consider essential. Here is a small overview of those features:

Windows 7 Home Premium features that Windows 7 Home Basic and Windows 7 Starter do not have:

• Full Windows Aero support: The graphical user interface and theme for most Windows 7 editions.
• Home Group (Create & Join): Easy network creation (the basic editions can only join but not create)
• Multi-Touch (touch capabilities for the PC)
• Premium Games (Internet Backgammon, Internet Checkers, and Internet Spades.)
• Windows Media Center

There are on the other hand features that are not included in Windows 7 Home Premium. Those are only available in the higher priced editions:

• Backup and Restore Center (backup to networks)
• Windows Server Domain support.
• Remote Desktop Server support.
• Location aware printing: Automatically changes the default printer based on the location of the user.
• Encrypting the file system
• Presentation mode: Presentation Mode is found in the Mobility Centre (Windows Key + X) and lets you control your machine’s behavior while you are giving presentations
• Windows XP Mode: Windows XP Mode and Windows Virtual PC, available on Windows 7 Professional and Windows 7 Ultimate, allow you to run multiple Windows environments, such as Windows XP Mode, from your Windows 7 desktop
• AppLocker (Ultimate only): Helps eliminate unwanted and unknown applications within an organization’s network
• BitLocker Drive Encryption (Ultimate only): Hard drive and removable media encryption
• BranchCache Distributed Cache (Ultimate only): BranchCache offers the potential of being able to access large files stored on servers much faster.
• DirectAccess (Ultimate only): Utilises IPv6-over-IPsec to encrypt comms over the internet between remote workers and the DirectAccess server
• Multilingual User Interface Pack (Ultimate only): Ability to switch to other interface languages.
• Virtual Hard Disk Booting (Ultimate only): Create a virtual hard disk image, install an operating system and boot it.

Finally there are also hardware limits in place. Windows 7 Home Premium supports a maximum of 16 Gigabytes of computer memory. This limit is raised to 192 Megabytes in Windows 7 Professional and Windows 7 Ultimate. Windows 7 Home Premium seems to be the natural choice for most home users unless one or multiple of the features only included in Windows 7 Pro or Ultimate are needed to operate the computer system.

The second interesting news story is that Microsoft decided to reduce the editions that Windows 7 will ship in when compared to Windows Vista. The so called edition chaos was one of the major reasons for confusion for prospective Windows Vista customers.

Windows 7 will basically be distributed as Windows 7 Home Premium, Windows 7 Professional and Windows 7 Ultimate. There are other versions but those are designed for different markets. Windows 7 Home Premium will be the equivalent of the Windows Vista Home Premium featuring a solid set of features. Windows 7 Professional will be the successor of Windows Vista Business which includes all features of Windows 7 Home Premium plus some business features like group policy based management tools, Remote Desktop host capabilities or network-based backup features.

Windows 7 Ultimate will include all features of Windows 7 Professional plus all supported language packs (something that the other editions miss and users have to pay for), BitLocker whole-drive encryption and capabilities to boot from vhd.

It basically comes down to three Windows 7 editions. It should also be noted that there are no talks yet about Windows 7 Ultimate extras, something that did not work as intended in Windows Vista as well as several users felt cheated by the lack of and quality of the extras.

Most of these information have been taken from our own Windows 7 blog which covers all the latest news about the upcoming operating system. A well visited Windows 7 Forum is available on the same site.

Do you think that those two strategic decisions by Microsoft are good ones? Will they convince Windows XP users to switch to Windows 7?

Driver Protection checks a database that is maintained locally for drivers that are known to be problematic. It can be updated via Windows Update and a new feature called Dynamic Update which essentially updates Windows 7 during installation if an Internet connection is available. Windows 7 might prevent those drivers from being loaded which is a somewhat scary sentence if there is no way to overrule the decision.

Internet Printing and the Online Print Ordering Wizard are two new print services. The first makes it possible to send print jobs to computers over the Internet using the http protocol while the second is supposed to make it easier to send digital photos to online print stores to order prints of them.

Homegroup was one of the first new features that came to light. It can connect Windows 7 computers in a home network so that they can share files and devices.

People Near Me is a service that is not explained in great detail. It basically allows a user to invite another user to join a program if the program is also installed on the other user’s computer and if the two computers are connected in a local network. There is no definition of programs. It could be entertainment related but also about communication or something completely different.

The last feature might cause lots of controversy. Trusted Platform Module (TPM) Services is an implementation of Trusted Computing which has caused privacy concerns.

The same document mentions Windows 7 Enterprise and Windows 7 Ultimate which seems to suggest that Microsoft will release a similar amount of Windows 7 editions.