Has anyone ran into issues on Windows 7 Ultimate and not Professional? At my company, they want my team to test only on Windows 7 Ultimate but support both Ultimate and Professional. I would rather test with Professional and they would rather us test with Ultimate. Is it a safe assumption that my software will work on Professional if it does on Ultimate??? I have to test standalone (JAVA, Visual Basic, C++) and web based applications. 32 bit only I have read about the differences between Professional and Ultimate, but I am not a Microsoft engineer. Thanks for your help!!!

If you are talking about application or hardware compatibility there are basically no differences between Professional and Ultimate. But note that Ultimate contain the Subsystem for UNIX so if your applications rely on that you must stick with the Ultimate version. As a general rule all apps that run on Ultimate will also run on Professional (or the other SKU:s). With Ultimate you do get a lot of nice features, such as BitLocker, AppLocker, support for Direct Access etc that are not available in Professional so bear that in mind.Blogging about Windows for IT pros at www.theexperienceblog.com

one more difference is that ultimate is only supported for 5 years, while prof and enterprise got 10 years. ultimate is for home user who wants it all hence the 5 years support