Looking at Four Windows Vista Versions That Might Interest You

If you haven't yet bought a copy of Vista, you could save yourself some headaches and more than a few bucks by getting the right version the first time. These four Vista versions — Home Basic, Home Premium, Business, and Ultimate — are your most likely choices. See Table 1 for an overview of the key features in Home Basic, Home Premium, and Business. Vista Ultimate, of course, has everything.

Table 1: Vista Versions and Key Features

The following list details some of the terms found in Table 1:

• Remote Desktop is a program that lets someone control your PC, or vice versa, with the computer owner's permission. If you work in an office at a medium-to-large corporation, some IT employee has probably used it to help you fix a problem on your PC. You can use any version of Vista — or any version of Windows, for that matter — to control a Vista PC running Remote Desktop host software. Only Vista Business and Ultimate allow you to turn your PC into a puppet. Any version of Windows can pull the strings.

• If your hard drive has ever crashed or your computer has otherwise gone berserk, you know the value of a backup, regardless of whether you had one at the time. All Vista versions include the ability to manually run a backup and store the backup on your PC. SafeDocs adds both the ability to back up to networked drives (hard drives inside other computers on your network) and the ability to run scheduled backups (so that the backups happen automatically and you don't have to think about them).

• Some folks need an extra layer of security — especially if they work with spreadsheets of employees' personal data or other confidential information. BitLocker encrypts an entire hard drive, so even if the drive (or your computer) is stolen, the bad guys will have a very hard time recovering any data from it.