The home premium is £ 44.99 from Amazon and the Professional version £ 89.99 no word yet on the ultimate price. These are all apparently full install o/s discs without browsers due to EU stupidity - not upgrades.
Seems to me the only difference between Home Premium and Pro is that Pro allows you to connect to a company network/intranet securely and easily and has a "back it up" nero type network and hdd package included.
Strangely , 12 hours after advertising on Amazon , the prices have been removed and they are not taking any more orders despite originally saying yesterday that the promotion would run from 15 July to 9 August.I guess they must have had an avalanche of pre-orders.
As for the PC health Check from PC World - just download the windows 7 "are you ready" tool from the MS page instead - simple.

Originally posted by domie:

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Seems to me the only difference between Home Premium and Pro is that Pro allows you to connect to a company network/intranet securely and easily and has a "back it up" nero type network and hdd package included.

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Here you go ~ http://windows.microsoft.com/en-US/windo...ompare-editions and my comments on which one i will choose ~

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Looks like it's either Premium for me, unless i decide i want Windows XP Mode in which case it'd be Professional. But don't want the other so called features over and above Professional ie don't want Domain join (it just sounds feeble and stupid, i'll continue to manually tweak my own settings thanks 'Nanny Microsoft'), Auto backup (same comment), Bitlocker (not interested in the least) or a choice of 35 languages (i only do English and Geek) :)

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Those ms own compare versions is kinda bs. With vista it says you can backup with premium and business, etc. What they don´t tell you is that business and ultimate have FULL backup instead just files. How is this different? Well with full backup it also stores your software and registery, and you can save quit alot of time when you take full backup after you have installed all the software you want, and then take your file backups every now and then. When you need to reinstall windows you just install it, take full backup and then file backup, thus saving hours of work and get "fresh" windows.

So in short they say cheaper versio has this feature, but what they dont for some reason is that more expensive one has more functions in that same feature.

Quite frankly , having seen how much system restore chips away at HDD space and how piss poor it is at restoring ( if you download more than one mp3 a day ) - i'll stick to external programs for back ups and miror creation such as Acronis.
Well Amazon UK now have the price back on for the Home Premium at the less attractive price of £ 74.99 - that £ 44.99 offer lasted about 4 hours lol.

Nothing but Vista on steroids. The interface is still horrible and it still takes 10 clicks to do simple tasks.

Originally posted by ChiefBrdy:

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Nothing but Vista on steroids. The interface is still horrible and it still takes 10 clicks to do simple tasks.

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Ouch, you'd have a lot to complain about using a Unix OS then, where everything can be done at the command line. You Windows-only/GUI-only/Point-and-click-only people have it all on a plate :)

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Originally posted by creaky:

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Originally posted by ChiefBrdy:

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Nothing but Vista on steroids. The interface is still horrible and it still takes 10 clicks to do simple tasks.

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Ouch, you'd have a lot to complain about using a Unix OS then, where everything can be done at the command line. You Windows-only/GUI-only/Point-and-click-only people have it all on a plate :)

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My job is in computer systems. There I expect to be challenged. At home with an OS meant for home or to be used by end users at work, it should be simple. Else, why have computers?

XP's interface was much simpler to use. Vista destroyed that. Windows 7 has the same interface as Vista except, now for example when you want to open up All Users. Instead of right clicking start as you did in Vista, you have to left click start, right click programs. I guess MS figured one click tasks were just too easy moving forward.

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Now I see where you're coming from, and i sort of agree. I do Unix/Linux for a living and i personally prefer to use Windows at home, for the same reason as you, i like to take it easy at home. I do use Linux at home too but i tend to stick to the simpler Linux distributions, home use is supposed to be fun or at least it's not supposed to be like being at work, and whilst i can fix most things that break or put up a fight, for most stuff i find Windows 'just works' so that's what i use the most.

However whether something takes 3 or 10 or 20 clicks, in a Windows OS i don't see the problem as Windows is just so simple, plus if something does take 10 clicks there's always a (shorter) workaround that a bit of research would identify. I don't mean to prolong the discussion on ease of use nor is my reply aimed solely at you, i just struggle to understand how Windows sometimes gets classed as difficult when it's not. I've used Windows since it first came out, and DOS before that, and Mainframes since around the same time, and my opinion has always been the same, Windows is just easy, regardless of how many clicks :)

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Originally posted by creaky:

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Now I see where you're coming from, and i sort of agree. I do Unix/Linux for a living and i personally prefer to use Windows at home, for the same reason as you, i like to take it easy at home. I do use Linux at home too but i tend to stick to the simpler Linux distributions, home use is supposed to be fun or at least it's not supposed to be like being at work, and whilst i can fix most things that break or put up a fight, for most stuff i find Windows 'just works' so that's what i use the most.

However whether something takes 3 or 10 or 20 clicks, in a Windows OS i don't see the problem as Windows is just so simple, plus if something does take 10 clicks there's always a (shorter) workaround that a bit of research would identify. I don't mean to prolong the discussion on ease of use nor is my reply aimed solely at you, i just struggle to understand how Windows sometimes gets classed as difficult when it's not. I've used Windows since it first came out, and DOS before that, and Mainframes since around the same time, and my opinion has always been the same, Windows is just easy, regardless of how many clicks :)

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Ok. Say you have a background of snow on your monitor and you want to change your icon text color to black. What's the shortcut for this:

Right click desktop
Select Personalize
Select Windows Color and Appearance
Select Open classic appearance properties for more color options
Select Advanced
Click arrow bar
Select Icon
Change color.

Rather than just clicking desktop, personalize and having the options on one page or tabbed. You have to go through 8 ridiculous steps. And do you think the average home user would even begin to know where to look for this. A simple task of changing icon text colors should not have to be Googled.

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Eh ?, in Windows 7 it's as simple as right click on the desktop, select Personalise, then in the top right of the Control Panel box that appears you just type in 'change desktop background' and select the new background picture. Select picture and click on 'Save changes'. Job's a good 'un.

My comment on googling is that i am a firm believer in self-help, if someone can use a computer in even the most rudimentary way they should in this day and age at least be aware of search engines, i accept they might not know what the hits/answers mean but they should at least know how to look for help.

Anyways, this isn't going anywhere methinks, i said i could sort of see where you were coming from.

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Originally posted by creaky:

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Eh ?, in Windows 7 it's as simple as right click on the desktop, select Personalise, then in the top right of the Control Panel box that appears you just type in 'change desktop background' and select the new background picture. Select picture and click on 'Save changes'. Job's a good 'un.

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That's fascinating. Only problem is, it has nothing to do with my scenario.

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I know. I was simply illustrating how easy stuff like this is.
'Fraid i'm not wasting any more breath on any further pointless nonsense re the trauma induced by the amounts of clicks of a mouse :)

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Originally posted by domie:

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Quite frankly , having seen how much system restore chips away at HDD space and how piss poor it is at restoring ( if you download more than one mp3 a day ) - i'll stick to external programs for back ups and miror creation such as Acronis.

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Given my experience with how little useful help System Restore was, I, too, use Acronis to backup every day, once a week, once a month, and once a year. Given Windows tendencies to mess up the simplest user settings at the drop of a hat and software behaving buggy, restoring back to a known working partition is the only way I've found to be absolutely sure you can get your system working again.