May soon be jumping into a modern piece of HW - havent
bought any CPU for about 3 years now.
So, if it's loaded with WIN7, which edition?
I want to be able to do home LAN for existing machines,
running NT4, W2KPro, and XPProSP2, and with net-resident printer (HP), no wireless (yet, but maybe) and with out any arbitary limits on the # of nodes or
anything silly like that. Want to set fixed IPs (not
DHCP, unless I want to). Need to mount disks from the
XPProSP2 machine to all (including the WIN7 machine).

So I've become minimally proficient at stuff like
configuring TCPIP, and other "techie"-leaning tasks.

Would like to not bump into
silly price point limits like only so many hosts, or
tech glitches like WIN7 can't mount network drives from
other platforms. And, of course, need good compatibility with BOINC and BoincView.......

So, what? Home premium? Pro? Extreme (is this only for other languages besides US?)

Who knows the details here?

thx

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Dave

i join to this question.

Home premium would most likely be the best for most normal homes.

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Windows 7 does not have any limits that you are wanting to avoid.

The only differences between the versions are (that are relative to your concerns anyway):

Home Premium (Vista & 7): Can not attach to an Active Directory Domain (the same goes for XP Home)
Business (Vista) / Pro (7): Can attach to an Active Directory Domain, includes Remote Desktop Protocol (the same goes for Windows XP Pro)
Ultimate (Vista & 7): Includes everything in Home and Bus/Pro and bitlocker technology, which supports encrypting the entire hard drive in case of theft. Mostly useful for laptops or high security machines.

All versions of Windows 7 do not have a limit on the number of "nodes" (they're individual machines, they do not care how many nodes are on your network). All versions of Windows 7 support fixed IP addresses (that's a feature Microsoft will never drop). All versions of Windows 7 can "mount" disks from another machine (by mounting, I'm assuming that means you have a share set up and you map the share to a drive letter on all your other machines?).

All versions of BOINC are compatible with Windows Vista/7, but BOINC v6.x is preferred since it supports "sandboxing" the user accounts as per Microsoft's Best Practices.

I can only imagine BOINCVIew is also compatible, but I do not run it and therefore cannot say for certain.

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I have a little farm. 5 crunchers all running Win 7 Pro (x64). They all have a network share to a XP Pro box. I was told by the shop that Home Premium has a limit on the number of machines it can see on a network, although this may have been a bit of mis-information.

The laptop that i'm typing this on is running Win 7 home premium (x64) and has a similar share to XP Pro box. It also runs BOINCview talking to all the crunchers and its using wireless.

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BOINC blog

From NT up to at least XP. There is a limit of 10 simultaneous connections to a network share. In Win7 or Vista this was bumped up to 20. At work I didn't have any issue using even Win7 Starter on our network. The only think I didn't do was connect to a NT 4.0 machine. Which I might try when I go into work in the next 30 min.

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SETI@home classic workunits: 93,865 CPU time: 863,447 hours
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From NT up to at least XP. There is a limit of 10 simultaneous connections to a network share. In Win7 or Vista this was bumped up to 20. At work I didn't have any issue using even Win7 Starter on our network. The only think I didn't do was connect to a NT 4.0 machine. Which I might try when I go into work in the next 30 min.

The key is "simultaneous". Most home users do not have 10 people using the same share at the same time. Before I installed a Windows 2000 Server on my network, I had a similar configuration and I did not have any issue connecting 15 PCs to a single file share (albeit not all at once).

Windows Vista and 7 Home Editions (including Starter) cannot join a Windows Active Directory Domain, but they can still access resources on the domain as long as the user account is authenticated. This should work for Vista -> NT 4.0 machines as well (at least, I have no issues with my Vista/7 machines connecting to my NT 4.0 machines or my NT 4.0 Server machine).

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From NT up to at least XP. There is a limit of 10 simultaneous connections to a network share. In Win7 or Vista this was bumped up to 20. At work I didn't have any issue using even Win7 Starter on our network. The only think I didn't do was connect to a NT 4.0 machine. Which I might try when I go into work in the next 30 min.

The key is "simultaneous". Most home users do not have 10 people using the same share at the same time. Before I installed a Windows 2000 Server on my network, I had a similar configuration and I did not have any issue connecting 15 PCs to a single file share (albeit not all at once).

Windows Vista and 7 Home Editions (including Starter) cannot join a Windows Active Directory Domain, but they can still access resources on the domain as long as the user account is authenticated. This should work for Vista -> NT 4.0 machines as well (at least, I have no issues with my Vista/7 machines connecting to my NT 4.0 machines or my NT 4.0 Server machine).

I loaded up a Win7 Starter image & was able to access everything on our network at work just fine. Connected to NT 4.0 workstation, sun solaris, & fedora network shares. Even to 2003 Server AD shares, tho the win7 machines was a non domain member, I just used user auth to connect. Even starter allows you to set manual IP addresses.

So Dave I think any version should be good for you. Depending on the features you want. Both Wikipedia & Microsoft have comparison charts for the features.
My personal choice would not to go with anything less then Professional as I use some of the features that you don't get with any lower level editions.

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AFAIK all "home" versions lack of RDP services. They can connect to remote host via RDP, but cant be connected. That is, it's impossible to logon remotely on "home" version windows (xp/vista/7 probably too).

That is correct Raistmer; all Windows Home editions (XP, Vista, 7) and Windows Starter do not support Remote Desktop Protocol (some call it Remote Desktop Procedure). You must have at least the Business/Professional version or Ultimate to get that functionality.

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AFAIK all "home" versions lack of RDP services. They can connect to remote host via RDP, but cant be connected. That is, it's impossible to logon remotely on "home" version windows (xp/vista/7 probably too).

However, VNC works just fine.

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I have a similar setup, with a home network, prnters, and varying flavors of Windows. I opted for Win 7 Pro, not wanting to fight directions I might go in the future. Its been good so far, and I've been running since beta. I'm actually thinking of upgrading my XP boxes to Win 7 as I like the interface better, now that I've gotten used to it. Can't wait to get rid of Vista off my notebook as it just feels and runs kludgy. And getting Vista to connect was harder than XP. That might be due to my XP familiarity tho.
Alex

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Thanks to all, a bunch of good information. I'll have to check Wiki - saw
the MS pages, and seemed like the only thing that really mattered in jumping
from Home Premium to Pro was for joining a domain (which I wouldn't have at
home).

But the part about RDP likely would be. right now, I do VNC into the XPPro machine
for some things hosted there that I like to get into from the daily driver.
Using TightVNC, but it's a little clunky, as in it does not support Fast User
Switching (which I do have the XPPro turned on), so I can only VNC into the
one user login which has TightVNC installed. Plus, when I am VNC'ed into the
XPPro desktop, mouse control on the physical console is somewhat messed up.

I've used remote desktop login at work (all XP) - but if I get W7Pro, will
I be able to login to it from other platforms (lesser Win versions), or go from
it to the lesser platforms, or is it only meaningful between 2 W7Pro platforms?

Or are other (free or shareware) VNC platforms more adept about modern OS'es
and multiple user usage?

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Dave

Newer versions of Remote Desktop support authentication protocols, but they are still backwards compatible with older versions. I can still Remote Desktop from my Win7 machine into my Windows 2000 Server machine and vice versa.

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Thanks to all, a bunch of good information. I'll have to check Wiki - saw
the MS pages, and seemed like the only thing that really mattered in jumping
from Home Premium to Pro was for joining a domain (which I wouldn't have at
home).

But the part about RDP likely would be. right now, I do VNC into the XPPro machine
for some things hosted there that I like to get into from the daily driver.
Using TightVNC, but it's a little clunky, as in it does not support Fast User
Switching (which I do have the XPPro turned on), so I can only VNC into the
one user login which has TightVNC installed. Plus, when I am VNC'ed into the
XPPro desktop, mouse control on the physical console is somewhat messed up.

I've used remote desktop login at work (all XP) - but if I get W7Pro, will
I be able to login to it from other platforms (lesser Win versions), or go from
it to the lesser platforms, or is it only meaningful between 2 W7Pro platforms?

Or are other (free or shareware) VNC platforms more adept about modern OS'es
and multiple user usage?

I just switched from RealVNC Free Edition to UltraVNC. Ultra VNC will run as a service in Vista/Win7 Where the Free version of RealVNC doesn't care to.

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