Nothing that I'm aware of, and I've been running it for the last two years. I'm not missing joining a Domain server, and 8Gbs works quite well.

I run Professional on my desktop and Home Premium (pre-installed) on my laptop.

When I first selected a version, the features that I thought might be more useful in Professional were 1) multiple sockets, 2) greater that 16 GB memory limit, 3) Windows XP Mode, and 4) remote desktop (client and host).

So far, I have not used any feature that Home Premium wouldn't have handled.

The Comparison Chart in this link might be useful.

I use 3 and 4 from John's list. If you've never needed remote desktop and don't think you'd need to I'd think premium would be fine.

Rob

I only use Pro because it allows creating recovery and repair back to square one of system build with a licensed image of the system.

I insist in all professional situations that use an OS that allows this.. so that I guarantee a system build will not be lost.

"I only use Pro because it allows creating recovery and repair back to square one of system build with a licensed image of the system."

I tried the Windows 7 Professional system image save function and went back to my old habits of a standalone backup and restore with GHOST 15. I never install GHOST on the machine because I think it tries to help me too much to get my job done. I'll admit that my method of backup and restore would not scale to a larger group well. It would get real tedious, real fast with a larger inventory of machines.

thanks guys, reassuring to know.

as it'll be on my existing rig (i7/920/12gb ram) i think home prem will do ok.

@videoitguy - I only use Pro because it allows creating recovery and repair back to square one of system build with a licensed image of the system.

not sure what you're saying? can't i do an image backup as i do (regularly) with home prem. from what i read the only difference in this aspect is you can't do so to network or nas with home.....

As far as I know -only the Pro versions of Win7 give you a way to do built-in images of OS drives built-up in a system - advantage is that is also tied into partial repair and recovery methods as well. Has nothing to do with networking features. And nothing to do with Microsoft's silly restore points tech inside Windows interface.

As others have pointed out you could use third-party products to restore images for the non-Pro versions..but a little more problematic approach as they have stated- and usually a restore means fully replace what your drive may have on it today.

I checked the Windows Home Premium installation on my laptop and the option to save a system image is available in Control Panel / Backup and Restore. Saving to a non-boot disk or partition is supported. The option to save "On a Network Location" was not present, however. This is likely because Windows 7 Home Premium can not join a domain. I did have shared folders available on my Home Group for these machines.

The Professional machine would allow me to save the image on any kind of network share while the Home Premium machine would not.

I was not aware that home premium win 7 did have the system image restore..thanks for reviewing that for us.