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I am planning the purchase of my next PC and need to move from XP to Vista or Win7 in order to support future Azure programming. At the same time I will be upgrading to VS2010.

The new PC will be a dedicated developer's workstation and unconnected e.g. there is no workgroup or domain membership to consider.

Would Windows 7 Home Premium 64bit be a false economy? Any gotchas like "sorry you can only install SSL server certs on Windows 7 Ultimate edition".

Edit: The "gotcha" above is an imaginary example.

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5 Answers

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I find the two biggest features missing from the home edition:

  1. Ability to join domains.
  2. Full disk backup and other management tools
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up vote 2 down vote

A quick look at Newegg shows that Windows 7 Ultimate costs 175 shipped, while Windows 7 Home Premium is 107. A difference of $68 => one hour of developer time. Not worth thinking about this. Just get Ultimate and stop worrying.

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I want your job. – Unknown Oct 31 '09 at 19:11
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Don't you have a MSDN or Technet license? Since you're using VS2010. If you want to test everything you probably need everything so Ultimate is the way to go.

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@Dvanes "Don't you have .. MSDN". Good point, I have a BizSpark licence which provides generous access to MSDN. However the new PC will have an SSD as the primary drive and since a Windows install on an SSD device seems tricky I am inclined to tick a Win7 box on the online order form. – camelCase Oct 31 '09 at 18:51
I have an intel SSD with windows 7, and the performance is wonderful. – user4612 Oct 31 '09 at 19:01
up vote 1 down vote

I just finished building my new PC with Windows 7 Ultimate. I have a BizSpark MSDN license so the choice of OS wasn't affected by the cost factor. I have to say that I am VERY happy with this setup.

If you meet the criteria, which isn't that difficult, I would highly suggest you try for a BizSpark license as it is free for 3 years and gives you licenses to everything you need as a developer. The licensing process was surprisingly easy too.

On a related note... I have a client who was reporting that their website wasn't working properly in Windows XP w/ IE. I tried it on several PCs running XP and couldn't duplicate the problem. Using the updated Virtual PC for Windows 7 I was able to spin up a virtualized instance of XP and duplicate the issue all within an hour. Virtualization is priceless IMHO and Windows 7 makes it a breeze.

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@AJ - Thanks for confirming BizSpark includes MSDN access to Win7 Ultimate. I joined BizSpark for the free Azure hosting and SQL Server licence but had not realized free consumer level software goodies were available as well. – camelCase Nov 1 '09 at 11:06
+1 "Virtualization is priceless IMHO and Windows 7 makes it a breeze." – Philip Nov 2 '09 at 15:29
up vote 1 down vote

I was irritated by not finding gpedit.msc on Windows Home Premium. My reason for getting Ultimate is that you can be sure that you have EVERY feature that you read about. E.g. the group policy editor.

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