New Limitations For Some Windows 7 Editions Revealed

Martin | Apr 26, 2009 | Comments

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Users who follow this blog closely already know that the cheaper, low-end editions of Windows 7 will come with limitations and less features than the medium- and high-end editions. Windows 7 Starter and Windows 7 Home Basic are the two editions that are usually considered low end. They miss features like full Aero support, touch functionality or Windows Media Center. The mid range products Windows 7 Home Premium and Windows 7 Professional all come with their own set of features. The core builds up on the lower editions but Microsoft has decided to add features unique to every edition. This is how the editions build up on each other:

Windows 7 Starter > Windows 7 Home Basic > Windows 7 Home Premium > Windows 7 Professional > Windows 7 Ultimate (Enterprise).

Paul Thurrott mentioned additional restrictions that have not been know before in a recent article on his website:

  • Windows 7 Starter and Home Basic will not come with AAC, H.264 or MPEG-2 support. Microsoft seems to have the intention to provide upgrades for those systems to add the support.
  • 4 Gigabytes of ram are supported by all Windows 7 editions in 32-bit mode. The differences are in 64-bit mode. Home Basic and Starter support a maximum of 8 Gigabytes, Home Premium 16 Gigabytes and Professional, Ultimate and Enterprise up to 192 Gigabytes of ram.
  • Windows Media Player Remote Media Experience (RME) is not available in Windows 7 Home Basic or Starter. However, all versions can share media over a home network.
  • All Windows 7 SKUs support 20 simultaneous SMB connections. This works out to 10 users, apparently.
  • Only windows 7 Professional, Ultimate and Enterprise support the Virtual XP Mode.
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About the Author: Martin Brinkmann is an Online Journalist from Germany who discovered his love for technology in high school. He is currently working as a freelancer for several publications and runs his own Internet website Ghacks

  • god
    New Limitation For Windows 7 Basic: only two mouse clicks per hour. :P
  • Hahah more like starter lol
  • Vigilante
    Leaving out codec support is the only one there i really think is a bit odd, especially with netbooks based on the nvidia ion platform likely to become quite popular when they are released.

    Additionally, who would likely be running basic/starter on a system with more than 8gb of ram? You'd need at least a Core i7 for that, if not some server hardware or extremely expensive memory modules.

    Samba support is really unlikely to be required in the two most basic versions beyond simple home filesharing, which almost certainly will be under 10 people at the same time.

    And finally, the virtual xp thing I think is a complete non-issue, most of the hardware running starter or home basic won't have VT tech to run the hypervisor anyway.


    From what I can tell, microsoft is simply slimming down the features least likely to actually be used in those builds, which I guess would make sense if the entire OS wasn't installed my default and then feature-stripped to fit the version... The codec thing is a bit of a mystery though, unless microsoft removed it to allow them to reduce the cost of the os in the lower price segments, which of course would make sense. Especially since free alternative codecs are available.
  • Peter
    One question... who has 192 gigabytes of ram in their system? lol
  • Vigilante
    It's to prevent folk running it on their kick ass quad processor servers with more memory than some folk have hard disk space. But still, I guess its best to have a high limit like that - who knows, Windows 7 might still be alive and kicking in 10+ years time when huge amounts of RAM is common.
  • phil
    well - no one will ever have more then 640kb of memory!
  • mrstarware
    Is there any real reason to limit the amount of Ram windows 7 will support? I mean why can't all the 32 or 64 bit editions allow up to 192 GBs of Ram?
  • Vigilante
    32bit limitation is obvious, 32 bit systems simply cant access more than 4gb of ram.

    As for the 64bit ones... Microsoft probably thinks you should pay for the access to anything higher.
  • Sam
    Actually that is incorrect. 32-bit windows can actually access up to 36-bit memory address space via PAE support which Microsoft decided was too difficult for driver manufacturers to handle so they didn't put it in their non-server OS's. You will see 32-bit Win2k3 supports up to 64GB in theory. I'm not sure if MS artificially limits lower than this.
  • Vigilante
    PAE support is available (and enabled automatically) in all home versions of windows which have XD/NX bit enabled. The problem is that all 32bit software would still only be able to use the 2gb of memory space allocated to 32 bit programs. Enabling PAE gives 32-bit systems access to a 36-bit address space for programs that have the PAE flag. They are still 32-bit systems, and all 32-bit apps run on the system, unless they have the PAE flag (which few do, requiring recompilation for little benefit), still only have access to 2gb of memory.

    Need less than 4gb or ram or have an older system? Go 32bit.
    Need 4gb or more of ram? Go 64bit.

    PAE was good in theory but bad in practice. The only good thing that has come from having PAE on a home computer system is that PAE is what allows NX/XD bit to operate, which helps keep to prevent software nasties like buffer overflows.

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Physical_Address_E...
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