Vista Enterprise v. Home Premium - 64bit

[liquidguru]

I have a new laptop with a dual core processor and 4GB of ram, so I want to install a 64 bit version of Vista. I can get all the drivers for 64 bit and I want to use this laptop to play with 64 bit, so this is not a question about whether or not I need 64 bit over 32 bit

I can either install the 64 bit version of Home Premium Vista or the 64 bit version of Vista Enterprise. I have been using the 32 bit version of Enterprise on my current laptop for nearly two years. A friend told me that the Enterprise version was better optimized than Home Premium. I was wondering whether there is, in fact, any truth to this? Is the Enterprise version better than the Home Premium version? I do not use Media Centre or Moviemaker.

Opinions would be welcome.

thanks

[gotenks98]

Not really. Basically Home Premium has all the business features stripped out. You cant join a domain and there are some other features its missing but I cant think of them now. As for as it being more optimized this I doubt. Pretty much all the vista flavors will work nearly the same on the same hardware.

[CoffeeFiend]

The only real difference is features you can or can't use.

Home Premium has features like media center, movie maker, parental controls and that kind of home-ish stuff.

Enterprise lacks those, but has different things instead, like being able to join domains, better management options (e.g. group policy), EFS, NAP, IIS and such things most people wouldn't use at home. The only thing some might really miss is being able to connect to their box using remote desktop (client works though, and there's always VNC & all that). Most people aren't able to buy this version anyways (myself included). Then again, Ultimate is probably just a few dollars more (which is what I chose personally).

[liquidguru]

Thanks for the replies.

As I suspected, it is really just a matter of whether I want the home-frills, or the 'pro-tools'...

I would like to get Ultimate, but it costs about $160 to upgrade, and I can't really see the advantage over Enterprise if I don't use media centre etc.

Thanks again gotenks98 and crahak