I've searched the forums but have not been able to find detailed comparisons of features in Windows 7 Home Premium and Windows 7 Professional. There is a very broad comparison in http://news.softpedia.com/images/news2/Windows-7-Home-Premium-vs-Professional-vs-Ultimate-3.jpg, but I suspect there are many more differences at the detail level. As an example of what I'm looking for, XP Home lacked many features that XP Professional had, at least out of the box; for example Group policy, admin tools, network logon without using the guest account, file level access control, iis web server, encrypting file system, and so on. I have not found anything at this level of detail for the two Windows 7 editions. Or does Windows 7 Home Premium really contain all features that Windows 7 Professional does apart from those 3 features listed in the link above, i.e. Windows XP mode, Domain Join and Automatic Backup? Can anyone give me a link to a more detailed comparison of the windows 7 editions?

HiThere is a long (6 page) article at the following link that does a good job of describing all of the various features in each edition.From Starter to Ultimate: What's really in each Windows 7 Edition? | Ed Botts Microsoft ReportHope this helps.Thank You for testing Windows 7 Ronnie Vernon MVP

Thanks

HiThere is a long (6 page) article at the following link that does a good job of describing all of the various features in each edition.From Starter to Ultimate: What's really in each Windows 7 Edition? | Ed Botts Microsoft ReportHope this helps.Thank You for testing Windows 7 Ronnie Vernon MVP Yes, those 6 pages are nice and pithy.But it really seems like an off-topic distraction to me. To be very direct: Is there a nice, straight-forward Microsoft chart that shows exactly which editions have which features? For example, just one of many, I am trying to find out if Home Premium provides Full Image Backup/Restore. Here is the page, at the Windows 7's home sitehttp://windows.microsoft.com/en-US/windows7/products/compare-editions

Yes, when you read the From Starter to Ultimate: What's really in each Windows 7 Edition? | Ed Botts Microsoft Report, it really only talks about the fairly high level features in the Microsoft artice http://windows.microsoft.com/en-US/windows7/products/compare-editions, though with a lot more background. I'm fairly sure that for XP there was a much more detailed chart that covered the kind of differences listed in my original post. I'm not convinced that the Windows 7 editions only differ in the features listed in these articles.If they do, it would be nice to have confirmation from Microsoft that this is the case, and if not, it would be nice to have a more detailed comparison.Iintend to get 3 Windows 7 pre-ordersystems,two Home Premium, and probably one Professional. However, if the differences between the two systems really are fully described by these two articles, I could manage with 3 Home Premium editions.

The most comprehensive comparison I found until now is this one: http://www.winsupersite.com/win7/win7_skus_compare.asp. Again, it's not from MS, but Paul Thurott uses to be well informed. (Courtesy to newnerd for the link.)Mobile AMD64 3000+, VIA Apollo K8T800 chipset, 1 G RAM, ATIRadeonMobility 9700, 20x DVDRW, C:XPSP3 (55G),D:WIN7 (25G),F:DATA (250G)

For most advanced home users the major difference between between Windows 7 Professional and Windows 7 Ultimate is that Professional is the lowest level version that contains the standard file encryption that previous Windows levels used while Windows 7 Ultimate adds the option of the new Bitlocker whole disk encryption. If you were happy with the existing encryption, Professional will probably work for you. Microsoft has now dropped the information on the standard encryption on their comparison web site leaving the impression that only Ultimate provides "encryption". Microsoft has also raised the price of the Professional version so it is much closer to the Ultimate version. My guess is that most people opted for the Professional option rather than buy the Ultimate product so they took these actions to steer more people to the more profitable Ultimate version whether really they need it or not. The Ultimate version provides a couple other features like virtual hard drive boot and additional foreign language support that most home users may not need or want. But that's about it. So for most people it all comes down to whether you want to use Bitlocker or not. It would be nice if Microsoft would be more explicit about this.