Windows 7 pre-order

[Bloodwych]

Anyone pre-ordered their copy?

I was looking at the differences between Home Premium (about £65) and Professional (about £150!!) and Ultimate (£160).

Home Premium sounds fine unless you want to join a domain, use encrypted external storage file system or use XP mode (I'd just dual boot).

Can't warrant the extra expense of the Professional or Ultimate version.

I'm REALLY tempted to pre-order home premium. £65 for a full retail version (which can be re-installed on any PC rather than single license per motherboard OEM) is a pretty good deal that beats any offers over in the USA.

Really tempted. Anyone taken the plunge?

[Harrison]

I probably won't be pre-ordering Win7 in any version and just wait for the final release before buying a copy. I do however want a version with the XP mode, and if the final retail copies are so closely priced I will probably buy the Ultimate edition.

The XP mode is worth it if you can afford one of the versions with it included. Unlike a copy of XP running in a virtual machine it actually works seemlessly with XP mode applications just opening in an XP mode window and looking identical to Win7 applications running alongside them.

And for older games, and for me older emulators that are no longer updated, this seemless XP mode will be a great inclusion.

The other big inclusion of Windows 7, DirectX 11, is also likely to be more of a leap forward in game visuals than DX10 ever was, and will probably be more of a requirement if gamers want to have the best from new games due next year. However for this requirement it will also mean a new graphics card, of which no DX11 supporting cards are yet on the market. I might therefore wait until these are on sale before upgrading to Win7. Possibly the ATI Radeon HD 5870 or very tempting will be the 5870 x2, which unlike the 4870 x2 which is 2 4870's joined together, the 5870 x2 is going to be more like a dual core CPU on a single card, with two 5870 GPUs on top of each other. This could be a big upgrade at a reasonable price compared to anything nVidia have planned on a price to performance basis. Plus the ATI 58xx cards are due out at the end of October, whereas nVidia won't be able to get their GT300 GPU based cards out until next year.