Many different sources are announcing that Windows 7 will have 6 different SKU’s available, and many are touting the end of Windows, because they are making the same marketing mistakes as Windows Vista.  I have a different perspective on this that I will justify after the SKU breakdown.  Here are the SKU’s and features that everybody is reporting:

Windows 7 Starter

• Available worldwide to OEMs on new PCs
• Missing Aero UI tweaks
• Limited to 3 simultaneous applications

Windows 7 Home Basic (Vista equivalent: $200)

• Only available in emerging markets
• Missing Aero UI tweaks

Windows 7 Home Premium (Vista equivalent: $260)

• Available worldwide, to OEMs and in retail
• Includes Aero UI tweaks
• Features multi-touch capabilities
• Adds “premium” games
• Adds media capabilities (Media Center, DVD playback, DVD creation, etc.)
• Can create home network groups

Windows 7 Professional (Vista equivalent: $300)

• Available worldwide, to OEMs and in retail
• Includes all features of Premium
• Adds enhanced networking capabilities (Remote Desktop host, domain support, offline folders, etc.)
• Adds Mobility Center
• Adds Presentation Mode

Windows 7 Enterprise

• Available only in volume licenses
• Includes all features of Professional
• Adds Branch Cache
• Adds Direct Access
• Adds BitLocker

Windows 7 Ultimate (Vista equivalent: $320)

• Limited OEM and retail availability
• Includes all features of Enterprise

Lets Break It Down

I am going to break this down, for Personal and Business users, in a couple of different ways:

1. First by SKU.
2. Then by who the feature set is targeted.
3. Then by the different user segments.

The first one is based on SKU and who will likely use each SKU and the XP Equivalent of the SKU.

So as you can see there are only a couple options available to you based on if you are a Personal or Business user.   The second break down I want to show you is who each of the feature sets is targeted at:

Finally, if we are to break this down even farther in to obvious user segments, and split Personal in to Average Joe and Power User, and Business in to Small Business (Average User) and Enterprise (Power User) you will see that there is really only one option available to each type of user:

I actually think this is quite smart, because each market segment: Average Joe, Power User, Small Business, and Enterprise, hits a different set of criteria and a different set of requirements for each segment.  So given the above and how they will be distributed you are probably only going to see one of two different SKU’s on your favorite OEM’s site, which is pretty equivilent to the XP SKU’s that you are use to:

So all in all I am pretty happy with this. I still think the marketing department could have gone with out the Starter and Home Basic versions, and privately marketed the Enterprise to Volumn License customers.  But it is what it is, and if they can keep the OEM’s selling on the Home Premium and Professional version only, I think Microsoft will have a great Windows Operating System both in perception and technically.  And we can all forget about the last 2 years of Windows Vista, sort of like we have done for Windows ME.

Recently I have been trying to squeak more speed out of my laptop by shutting down unnecessary services that seem to come with most every software and device driver.  To do this I started with a clean install of Windows Vista and installed the driver only option for my hardware and then got rid of many of the useless services that come with software like iTunes, VMware, and other stuff I find useful.

However with all that tweaking it still doesn’t create an optimal installation of Windows Vista, because Windows by default still runs a ton of unnessisary services.  For example, Microsoft thought it was nessisary to enabled Tablet PC Pen Input by default which I venture to say is useless to a vast majority of Windows Vista users.

Coincidentally while checking out the new HD feature available on YouTube I stubled across an interesting video describing a website called Speedy Vista.

Windows Vista has around 130 services. According many reports, Vista is very computer intensive, so it may take a couple tweaks to lighten it up a bit to suit your needs. The names are rather vague like ‘ReadyBoost’ and ‘SuperFetch’. How will you know which are safe to disable? Hopefully we can help. We have a full list of all Vista services and recommended settings for them. This site contains registry files for easily resetting your services settings back to factory in case you mess it up or just wish to have a good way to go back to factory.

The website offers a cheat sheet of services you can safely shut off, and if you are unsure what the service does, and don’t want to make a mistake, it has a description of what the services does.  But my favorite part of this website is that it provides a batch file and or a registry file that will shut off the unnessisary services automatically.

Windows Vista ‘Safe’ Settings reg bat – Use at your own risk. I’ve tried to weed out services that are obviously unnecessary to give you a good starting point to tweaking for your own needs/preference. Please e-mail me any problems, etc.

Windows Vista Tweaked Settings reg bat- Use at your own risk. Works for me for internet, Windows Update, DVD playing, most other things I want to do. May cause some software, etc. to stop working, but I would like to hope not. Please send me feedback on this file as well as safe if you have any issues running them. It assumes that you have your own Firewall software and Spyware software.

Windows Vista Minimal Settings reg bat – Use at your own risk. Works for me for internet, Windows Update, DVD playing, most other things I want to do. May cause some software, etc. to stop working, but I would like to hope not. Please send me feedback on this file as well as safe if you have any issues running them. It assumes that you have your own Firewall software and Spyware software.

Disclaimer: Use this site at your own risk. I am not responsible for damage to your computer, or anything else.

If none of these above options work for you, you can even use their wizard to turn on and off the services that you don’t want to use.  This allows you to create your own custom registry file to your own specifications.

I just wanted to post this interesting website since I haven’t posted in the past month, because of my book writing.  Which I am happy to say that I am starting my last chapter and I should be done by the end of the year so I can resume my normal posting schedule.

I just can’t take Windows Vista anymore so I am ditching it for Windows Mojave.  I have heard great things about it and anything must be better than Windows Vista.

Check it out for yourself:
http://www.mojaveexperiment.com

By the way, I am still alive, just very busy with some cool things that have been happening in my life.  I will share in the next couple of weeks.