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First look - Windows 7 beta 1 Home Premium + Windows Anytime Upgrade

The other day I got access to the Home Premium edition of Windows 7. After a tortuously long download process I got my hands on the ISO and installed it on a few machines to check it out.

Written by Adrian Kingsley-Hughes, Senior Contributing Editor Jan. 9, 2009 at 5:09 a.m. PT

The other day I got access to the Home Premium edition of Windows 7. After a tortuously long download process I got my hands on the ISO and installed it on a few machines to check it out.

So, what's the difference between Windows 7 Home Premium and Ultimate editions? Well, after spending a couple of hours with the OS it seems that the differences are almost identical to the differences between the two editions of Vista.

Here are the most significant differences:

Note: In the screen shots below Home Premium is on the left and Ultimate on the right.

System screen

OK, that's obvious!

No Remote Desktop

Windows 7 Home Premium doesn't have Remote Desktop support.

No BitLocker Drive Encryption

Also absent from Home Premium is BitLocker Drive Encryption support.

No image backup

Another feature missing from Home Premium is the ability to image a system.

While I'm looking at Home Premium, let's take a quick look at the Windows Anytime Upgrade Process. It's all pretty self explanatory and took me about 20 minutes to complete and went very smoothly.