Vista Features and Support Spread Between Versions

Paul Thurrott is at it again. And I'm starting to wish he'd just shut up, because I'm not sure that this is good news ...

In two separate articles, Thurrott reveals specifics about the features and hardware support that the various editions of Windows Vista will contain.

Bottom line, it's starting to sound like Vista Ultimate Edition is the only one worth owning.

Starter Home Basic will NOT contain Aero Glass, rolodex, tab previews or task bar previews. Not that it's disabled if you can't run it smoothly ... it's just not there.

Tablet Users will have to get Home Premium Edition at a minimum in order to get the tablet widgets, and these versions will also contain all the DVD authoring, Movie Maker, and "premium games". Home Premium and Ultimate (no business editions) will have the Media Center widgets.

As for hardware support, the Home versions will only support one processor. There are some RAM limitations, but I'm not seeing 8GB of RAM for Home Basic as a stumbling block. It's unclear if a Hyper-Threading processor will count as one or two processors under this arrangement. If it does, anyone with a HT processor will be immediately forced to get the Ultimate edition if they want the Home features and use of their full processor capability.

Update: Thurrott has updated the Windows SuperSite with more detailed information about the product versions and features offered, including a matrix breakdown of each feature and the version in which it is included.