What are the disadvantages, or advantages of Windows 7 Starter Edition?
Windows 7 Starter Edition is supposedly focused at Netbooks. Wikipedia words this a little differently: “Out of all the different editions (Starter, Home Basic, Home Premium, Professional, Enterprise, and Ultimate), the Starter edition has been designed for netbooks, Home Basic for the developing world”. I doubt the accuracy of this statement. It seems foolish to make Starter more limited than Basic if it is targeted for Netbooks — especially in replacement of Windows XP.
There is no 64-bit version of Windows 7 Starter, and the maximum amount of running programs is limited to three — my personal biggest concern with Starter, but more about that later.
The following features have been disabled. These are the features that differ from the Home version.
- Multiple monitor support is disabled
- No fast user switching is available
- The desktop wallpaper can not be changed
- The Mobility Centre (useful for PDA’s) is non-existant
- Windows Aero is disabled (eye candy)
- There are no games included with Starter
- Windows Media Center is not included
- DVD Playback is not supported
I received the information of disabled features from this comparison chart on Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.
About program limitations:
A maximum of three open programs is allowed in Starter. This excluded services, actual processes, Windows Explorer windows, system-tray programs, multiple browser tabs, and antivirus. For the basic user, these limitations will not cause many problems.
I could have Word, FireFox, and Windows Media Player open all at the same time. If I open another program, Windows will tell me that I need to close one of my other programs before I can open another one. Personally, this would drive me up the wall. Right now, I have three programs open — FireFox, Email, and my media player. If I wanted to open Open Office Writer (a program similar to Word), I would have to close one of my open programs. It just seems like you end up juggling programs — not fun.
Grandma won’t have a major problem with these limitation (unless your grandma was one of those mega-programmer/hardware/software architecture designers from the 60’s…) A multi-tasker (like myself) will have problems.
