Originally posted by: greylica
Originally posted by: Zoinks
I thought figuring out which of 4 versions was bad enough, now i have to figure out 32 or 64?!? Damn.
And to help you choose very wrong there is two Vista's that is not Real Vista, Home Basic and Starter, they are so caped that don't have anything usable.
Seeing as you aren't supposed to even be able to buy Starter outside of 3rd world nations, that shouldn't be an issue for most posters on here.
As for those questioning the 4 versions, I'll state for the upteen-millionth time:
XP Home->Home Basic
XP MCE-> Home Premium
XP Pro-> Business
XP Pro+MCE-> Ultimate
There. Done. Oh, and MS is pushing MCE heavily, so they've crippled Home Basic.
Then again, for the OEM channel, that shouldn't really be an issue. Take Dell- At the moment, their only desktops that you can even order XP Home with are the absolute cheapest configs of the C521 and E521 (every model above the cheapest config is MCE, and all E520s are MCE). For those cheapest configs, the upgrade to MCE- and they're pushing it heavily- is $10. On their laptops, the two cheaper (out of 3) configs of the Inspiron 1501 default to XP Home, again with the cheap upgrade. The 1505 and up and the higher 1501 config default to MCE. And before we start talking about capabilities- only the cheapest model of the 1501 will even allow you to config for 512MB of ram. Every other consumer laptop Dell is selling has a minimum of 1GB.
Most home users, who buy from OEMs, will never even know that Vista Home Basic exists. Or even if they do, they'll never even have the opportunity to get it.