Windows 7 - Compare Windows 7 Editions

You guys are wonderful!

For those of you that have Enterprise, does it bother you that end-of-support occurs 5 years earlier than Professional?


I realize this may not bother folks that frequently upgrade, but I tend to keep what I've got a little longer than a lot of people.


I was stunned when I first found out about this...

Hello Sibbil, and welcome to Seven Forums.

That would be Start, Basic, Home Premium, and Ultimate where the end-of-support occurs 5 years earlier than Professional and Enterprise. Professional and Enterprise both have the same end-of-support 5 years after the others.

This is normal for the home user editions to have support for it end before the business editions.

Wow. First post and I messed it up! But thanks for the welcome!

Anyway, meant to say "For those of you that have Ultimate..."

Guess I kind of figured that since Ultimate was more closely aligned with Enterprise (almost identical feature-wise) that they would have the same support dates. I realize that consumer versions have half the life of business versions, and that XP was a dramatic exception to most of the others, but even XP Home with the latest SP is good until April 2014 (via Extended Support Phase), right? I wonder if SP1 for Windows 7 extends the dates...

I wonder if I can downgrade to Professional when support runs out for Ultimate.

You could, but it would have to be a clean install to Profesional from Ultimate.

Was wondering more about cost (in $, not time ) -- just seems to me that it shoudn't cost me to downgrade to an edition of an OS I already "own", to be able to continue receiving security updates.

But, really, wondering more about how folks felt about buying the more expensive Ultimate rather than Professional, only to find that Pro was more aligned with Enterprise (according to MS). This even though Ultimate is more Enterprise than Pro is (feature-wise)...

Thanks for your responses !

Yep, Enterprise and Ultimate are just about equal except that Enterprise is geared more toward corporations.

Professional has less features than Ultimate or Enterprise, but is geared more towards businesses.

Ultimate is geared more towards the power user (consumer).

Enterprise and Professional get longer support since it usually takes businesses and corporations longer to be able to update to a newer version of Windows due to the cost of upgrading that many systems. Where as the home user (consumer) is able to upgrade a lot easier and faster.

Unfortunately, to downgrade would mean having to purchase a new key for the downgraded edition. Personally I wouldn't worry about downgrading to get longer support since Windows 7 Ultimate will still run just as well afterwards. By the time support runs out, you would most likely have already wanted to upgrade to Windows 8, or still be just as happy with Windows 7 Ultimate.

Thanks, Shawn. I'll eventually replace every one of the 200+ links I have bookmarked with one of your tutorials!

LOL, no problem mate.