Which Edition

Pardon this post if it has been answered.
I'm thinking of upgrading from Vista Home Premium to Windows 7, but uncertain which edition to go with? Price is a factor and the machine is mostly used for home media and surfing as well as some office. the most important feature I'm interested in is being able to perform a disc image for full recovery purposes, recently having my Vista system crash!
I have been looking at 7 Home Premium but don't understand which editions offer a on board "complete" disc imaging feature, or If it would be better to use an after market program.
The imaging feature needs to be fairly simple but more important, reliable!

I've started saving almost all data to an external hard drive so in the event of another crash, I save myself a lot of grief, but it seems I always leave some things on the desktop vulnerable. I been advised to just do an upgrade, but if I ever have to re-format again, that sounds a little messy! I would rather keep it simple, say a boot (recovery) disc and a program (OS) disc.
Any advise would be greatly appreciated.
N2

For home requirements, home premium should do just fine.

All win7 editions have the same inbuilt backup and restore feature, theres no difference between editions.

Opinions vary on this but the windows backup can be a bit finicky. A lot of people here use a 3rd party freeware called Macrium Reflect to image and restore system drives. The image is a replica of whatever the system is right now, it includes all the installed apps.

Windows i7 920 said:

Personally, I think professional edition gives you the most for your money as it isn't much more expensive than Home Premium.

Not really for a home user. See this table that compares editions.

Compare Windows 7 Editions

The features that pro offers over home premium are basically XP mode, ability to join a domain, backing up to a network and group policy editor. The first three are not very important for home use. The last can be but we know thats just a front end for the registry, so everything can be done at the registry level itself.

Bill2, I thought I read somewhere or on Macrium Reflects FAQ's that there might be some sort of conflict with Windows 7's image program and Macrium Reflect running together??
Thanks
N2

I've used Macrium with no conflicts whatsoever with any program.

Great!, do you recommend the free addition, or full program for the novice? And as far as Windows 7 Home Premium, whats your opinion of an upgrade vs the full retail version? which would be easier incase I have to re-format in the future?
Thanks
N2

1) The free edition is perfectly adequate. But heres a comparison.

http://www.macrium.com/reflectfree.asp

2) Since you already own a vista license, buy a win7 upgrade. You can even do a clean install of win7 with an upgrade disk. Reformatting in the future will not be a issue since the upgrade license is a retail one.