Posted on Tuesday, April 28 2009 @ 17:17 CEST by Thomas De Maesschalck
All the 32-bit versions support only up to 4GB of course, but surprisingly the 64-bit Home Basic and Starter editions support only up to 8GB of RAM. This gets doubled to 16GB in Home Premium, and to address up to 192GB of RAM you will need the Professional, Enterprise or Ultimate edition of Windows 7.
The reporter also found out that Windows 7 Home Basic and Starter will not come with built-in support for DVD playback and Dolby Digital. However, they will have AAC and H.264 decoding support.
MPEG-2 decoding (i.e. DVD playback) and Dolby Digital support will not be included in Windows 7 Home Basic and Starter. But AAC and H.264 decoding *will* be included. So in going through the licensing policies again--which, in my defense, are hard to read--I discovered an earlier mistake. Sorry for any confusion that caused.
Maximum RAM. All 32-bit versions of Windows 7 "support" 4 GB of RAM, of course. But if you go 64-bit, you can add up to 8 GB in Home Basic and Starter, 16 GB in Home Premium, and 192 GB in Professional, Enterprise, and Ultimate.
Windows Media Player Remote Media Experience (RME) is not available in Windows 7 Home Basic or Starter. However, all versions can share media over a home network.
All Windows 7 SKUs support 20 simultaneous SMB connections. This works out to 10 users, apparently.
XP Mode (formerly Virtual PC). As we first revealed yesterday, only Windows 7 Professional, Enterprise, and Ultimate are licensed to install XP Mode.
