Windows Anytime Upgrade

Unlike previous versions of Windows, Vista installs itself with the capability to upgrade from a weaker version to a more-capable version at any time. You simply run the Anytime Upgrade applet, select a source to purchase an upgrade license from, and your PC is quickly enhanced with the more powerful version you’ve selected. _ Vista Home Basic can be upgraded in this way to Home Premium or Ultimate.

_ Vista Home Premium and Vista Business can be upgraded to Ultimate.

At this writing, it doesn’t appear that the Home versions of Vista can be upgraded in this way to Vista Business or Enterprise. It also doesn’t seem likely that the Enterprise version will allow an easy upgrade path to Vista Ultimate. Purchasing a more capable version of Vista at retail and installing it over a lesser version may be the only way to migrate in these cases.

RAM Limitations of Vista Versions

The Home versions of Vista suffer from some stricter limitations on available main memory and peer-to-peer networking than the non-Home versions. We’ll summarize these limits as follows:

_ 32-bit Vista versions will always be limited to 4 GB of RAM, due to limitations of x86 processors.

_ 64-bit Vista versions have dramatically different limitations in the various editions:

• Home Basic is limited to 8 GB or RAM.

• Home Premium is limited to 16 GB of RAM.

• Business, Enterprise, and Ultimate can access over 128 GB of RAM.

Peer-to-Peer Networking Limitations

Peer-to-peer networking, called SMB (for small-to-medium business) networking by Microsoft, is also artificially restricted:

_ Home Basic can support only 5 peer-to-peer connections;

_ All other Vista versions can support 10 peer-to-peer connections.

_ Business, Enterprise, and Ultimate can support many more connections, of course, with users logging on to one or more network servers.