The Ultimate Vista: Is it Worth the Difference?

Much criticism has been aimed at Vista, and one of the complaints I hear a lot is that there are too darn many different editions. People are confused about the differences in price and features between their off-the-shelf options: Home Basic, Home Premium, Business and Ultimate (Starter edition is only available in "emerging markets" outside the U.S., and Enterprise edition is only sold to large companies through volume licensing).

There were four editions of XP (Home, Professional, Tablet and Media Center editions) but only two were available to consumers from retail outlets. So with Vista, the individual customer's options have doubled, and not everyone is happy about that. It's good to have choices, but Microsoft and hardware vendors haven't done such a great job of making it clear which of those choices is appropriate in a given situation.

It does make a difference. I was bitten in the behind by the "different edition/different features" bug last week, when I printed instructions for how to enable the built-in Administrator account that's disabled by default in Vista. The steps I provided work fine on my Vista Ultimate machine, but I got numerous messages from readers who informed me that they couldn't do it on their computers running Home Premium. In fact, to do it in that OS, you have to use the command line (see this week's "How To").

The subtle and not-so-subtle differences between the editions continued to hit home this past week, as we became better acquainted with our new HP Media Center that came with Vista Home Premium installed. In fact, it caused us to wonder if the fact that Home Premium is the edition that comes preinstalled on most computers is one of the reasons for Vista's bad reputation. I've been running Ultimate on my desktops for years now (since the betas) and have had few problems, but we immediately ran into a few with this Home Premium machine.

The first incident occurred when Tom wanted to connect to its desktop remotely to make some configuration changes. Oops - no Remote Desktop services. The Home editions have the Remote Desktop Protocol (RDP) client software for connecting to other desktops, but they can't be set up as RDP servers so others can connect to their desktops.

You can install RealVNC to provide that functionality, but it costs $30. There's a free version, but it doesn't support Vista. We installed the trial version and it works great, but we also started looking for free alternatives. We had already put more money into this machine than we'd planned. You can read that continuing saga on my blog at
Deb-Tech

We checked out TightVNC, an open source program, but its web site had this to say: "Unfortunately, TightVNC has known issues with the Windows Vista operating system, just like all other versions and free distributions of VNC-derived software. Vista's new security features broke the way VNC service was implemented. And it's not clear yet how much effort would be required to work around the problems. Unfortunately, that does not look very simple." Well, we know VNC can work because the trial version of RealVNC was working fine. A WXPnews reader tipped us off to UltraVNC and said he was using it with Vista, with no problems. You can download it here:
SourceForge.net: Files

Be sure you download the version that's appropriate for your OS (if you're using 64 bit Vista, you'll have to download the binaries. Otherwise, download the Setup files for Win32). Installation was quick and painless, but there are more configuration options for the UltraVNC server than for RealVNC. You'll also need to install the VNC client software on the computers from which you want to connect remotely.

Note that when using remote control software (including Windows Remote Desktop) with a PC running Media Center , you may not have full Media Center functionality over the remote connection. If you connect via Windows RDC, you can open the Media Center application, configure its options, scroll through its menus, set the program guide, and listen to the music and view pictures through Media Center. However, you can't play back recorded TV or other videos over the remote connection. You get a message that says "Video not supported." If you try to open Media Center over a VNC connection, in some cases you may get a black screen if Media Center opens full screen. In other cases, you can open the Media Center app and even play the videos or recorded TV programs, but you don't get the sound.

One thing about the VNC programs that's better than Windows Remote Desktop Connection is that with the latter, only one concurrent user is supported. That means when you connect to the host desktop from a remote computer, the host screen goes black and then goes to a logon screen. In other words, you can't have someone sitting at the host computer and accessing the desktop at the same time you're accessing it remotely. VNC works more like Windows Remote Assistance, where both the person sitting in front of the host computer and the person accessing it remotely can see the screen and input to it.

So it's clear that the exclusion of Remote Desktop in Home Premium can be worked around by installing a third party remote control program, although you sacrifice some features - most notably, audio support (there are a few paid remote control software programs that do support sound, such as Timbuktu, but as far as I've been able to discern, they don't yet support Vista. Readers, if you know of one that does, please let me know).

Enough about remote control. What else differentiates Home Premium from its big brother, Ultimate edition? And are the differences worth the $60 price difference? One feature that's important to me, but won't matter as much to most home users, is the ability to be a member of a Windows domain. The Home editions can't do that. If your Vista computer is a laptop that you take to work with you, you may need to be able to join to the company domain, and in that case, you need Business or Ultimate edition.

But perhaps the most important feature that's gone missing in Home Premium is the ability to do a complete PC image backup and restore. That's one of my favorite things in Vista Ultimate, and back when I first started using it and was doing a lot of experimenting with installing programs that weren't compatible, I used it a lot. With this feature, you can do more than back up your data; you can make a complete image of your PC, including the operating system and applications. Alas, when we were having problems getting the new Media Center working correctly and were considering making an image backup before trying some potentially dangerous fixes, we discovered that the feature is only available in Business, Enterprise and Ultimate editions.

You can get similar image backup functionality with a third party program like Acronis True Image - but the cost, $49.99, is almost as much as the difference between the current $259.95 price of Home Premium and the $319.95 price of Ultimate. And if you don't want/need Media Center, the difference between Home Premium and Business edition (at $299) is only forty bucks.

And then there's the cost of a fax and scanning solution if you need those - because Home Premium also leaves out Windows Fax and Scan. If you have suitable software that came with your fax/scanner hardware, that might not be an issue, (and there are free fax/scan utilities out there) but I like the simplicity and ease of use of the fax and scanning application that comes with Vista's high end editions.

Finally, if you're running Vista on a laptop and you have sensitive data on it, BitLocker can provide extra protection in case the system is lost or stolen. That's another feature that you don't get with the Home editions. You could buy a third party full disk encryption solution like PGP's Whole Disk Encryption, but it costs $119. There are open source alternatives, but many of them don't work with Vista.

So when it comes down to it, is Ultimate worth the extra cost? Ultimately (no pun intended), it depends on what you want to do with your Vista computer. For many people, the answer is yes. Others don't need these extra features or will be satisfied with freeware or low cost third party alternatives. Here is a features and price comparison of all the retail editions of Vista:
Windows Vista: Compare editions

If you have a hankering for a higher edition than what you've got, be aware of Microsoft's Anytime Upgrade program that makes it easy to "move on up."
Upgrade to another edition of Windows*Vista - Windows Vista Help

Tell us what you think. What edition of Vista do you use? Have you had to buy third party software to add features to the Home edition that you would have gotten built-in with Business or Ultimate? Did you buy a computer with Home Premium and later wish you'd sprung for a high end version? Or conversely, did you go all out for Ultimate and find that you would have been just as happy, and a few dollars richer, if you'd saved the dough and gone with a Home edition? How about the "forgotten edition," Home Basic? Have you ever used it? Those who want the look of XP with the enhanced security and search function and easier networking of Vista might do well to check it out. Are you annoyed that Microsoft dropped prices on some Vista editions after you bought yours? Post your comments