New
#101
Special needs here, still unsure
For now, I'm running an... er... "unofficial" copy of Windows 7 Ultimate, but I do intend to buy a license very soon. However, I'm undecided between Home Premium and Ultimate. Professional is ruled out, because it would give me no real advantage, and its price here is just a little bit less than Ultimate's, so why bother?
My situation is somewhat unusual and different from most folks on this forum, and this is why my decision is also more difficult. First of all, I live in Brazil. Here, upgrade licenses are not being sold - only the full (FPP) ones. Family packs, student licenses? Forget it. Windows Anytime Upgrade is also unavailable here, so I can't start with Home Premium and later upgrade to Ultimate if I decide so, except if I buy a pricey full Ultimate license anew and lose my entire previous investment. And prices are higher here than in the U.S. With such policies for Brazil, Microsoft is on its knees imploring for Brazilians to pirate its system, don't you think so?
Now, I live alone, work from home as a technical translator (English-Portuguese and vice versa), live almost a hermit's life, rarely going out, and when I do, my cell phone serves me well. So, I don't have a laptop because I don't need one, and BitLocker is useless to me. (And if I had a laptop, TrueCrypt might not have the same strength as TPM encryption, but I have no military or millionaire trade secrets, and TrueCrypt would do very well against the petty street thieves who would just want to sell the PC for peanuts to buy dope, and who would be my only concern in that case.) I have only one desktop PC and no home network; so, network backups won't be missed. Besides, even the Starter edition can run a third-party program to do that - you only can't use Windows 7's native backup utility to save your backups to a networked location.
Likewise, my old Athlon 64 3800+ processor is not compatible with XP virtualization mode, but while I do need to use a few XP-only apps, free VMware Player 3.0 does the same job very fast and efficiently here without any problems (tested and approved, with excellent performance even with my 4-year-old single-core processor and 2 GB RAM). And VMware can run on any Windows 7 SKU, without requiring any hardware virtualization support.
Considering that an Ultimate license costs almost twice as much as a Home Premium license here (about U.S.$ 390 vs. U.S.$ 230 -- and the damage to the pockets in local currency and at local income levels hurts more than this sounds!), Home Premium would be a no-brainer for me, except for one thing: the multilingual user interface (MUI) feature that only Ultimate offers.
In my translation and localization work, sometimes I need to have the exact wording the system displays in messages, menus, screens, etc., in both English and Portuguese. Sometimes screen captures are handy, too, and I have had to ask friends to get them for me. I am using a U.S. edition of Windows 7; I have tested the Brazilian Portuguese MUI in it, and it was perfect - even system folders like Program Files were renamed Arquivos de Programas, while maintaining compatibility and switching back to English flawlessly later.
Of course, Windows 7 copies available for sale here are all in Brazilian Portuguese. So, I'm wondering if I can activate an "unofficial" English copy of Windows 7 Home Premium with a Brazilian key (meaning I don't know both if it would work and if it would be legal). Such work assignments where I need screens and messages in both languages are not very frequent, and I could create a partition image, briefly install the Portuguese version (I'd have the genuine DVDs, after all), get what I need, then restore the original partition. Much more troublesome than just activating a MUI, but it would work.
Weighing all the pros and cons, I think Home Premium will be my most likely buy. What would you do in my place, guys and girls?