Turn Vista Home Premium To Ultimate Without Spending Extra Money
I am starting off a series of articles today to show you how to get the extra functionality of Windows Vista Ultimate without spending the outrageous cost of $399. In fact we are not going to spend one cent more in currency, the only thing we will have to spend is some time. Hopefully through this series you will be able to spend as little of your own time as necessary by using my easy to follow tutorials.
Before we begin, lets take a look at what Vista Ultimate offers that Home Premium does not. Here is a chart of features included in Ultimate that Home Premium lacks out of the box. Keep in mind that this refers to Pre-SP1. Throughout this series I will include additional SP1 information.
| Windows Vista Ultimate | Windows Home Premium |
| BitLocker Drive Encryption | Not Included |
| Multilingual User Interface | Not Included |
| Virtual PC | Not Included |
| Remote Desktop | Not Included |
| Complete Backup / Restore | Not Included |
| Shadow Copy Backup | Not Included |
| Offline Files and Folders | Not Included |
| Encrypting File System | Not Included |
The list above is what Microsoft published as a guide to help the consumer choose the version of Vista that is right for them. Now, there are even more astonishing differences between Vista Home Basic vs Home Premium vs Business etc. I mean, why on earth would an OS not include everything on one edition? These features (or lack thereof) between each version are simply not worth the hundreds of dollars in price difference. To give you an idea of what topics will be covered in this series, check out this list of what we can add to make Home Premium as good if not BETTER than Vista Ultimate. This is ONLY a partial list.
| Vista Ultimate Feature | Free Solution |
| Complete Backup / Restore | Seagate's DiscWizard |
| Bitlocker Drive Encryption | TrueCrypt |
| Virtual PC | Virtual PC 2007 (free download) |
Also, I am working on developing a stable work around for Vista Home Premium's lack of ability to join a domain. Most home users probably wouldn't utilize anything like this … but I love a challenge. So stick with me! Over the next days and weeks I will be covering some very cool information!
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Virtual PC 2007 is not supported on home versions of Windows
Not supported but it still works
Have you learned how to join to a domain using premium yet?
Have you figured out a work around for the Vista Home premium and domain issue.
I have installed Virtual PC on my laptop with Vista Home Premium and it does not work properly. I know an earlier comment said that it does but it does not! The program will load, install, and even run but it will not recognize any external drives therfore no programs are installable on any of the operating sytems that you load unless you download them from the net. I need to be able to load programs I have on disk that will only run on Wnidows XP. Is there a solution to this. I would greatly appreciate any help!!
I have the same problem I have vista home premium and I need virtual pc for school related work, I was thinking about upgrading, but its not in my price range for one thing, I have a solution but have not tested it(it should work no problem though). I have a retired laptop with XP so I was just going tto partition my HD and put XP on it and just boot it when I need it, Hopefully you can do that otherwise wait till they offer virtual pc on home premium
Love your site. I have a problem. Vista 64 bit home premium. Tried to install Virtualbox but a message appears that the administrator has set policies that don't allow me to install this program. I have searched and read for hours and hours and cannot fix it. I used an administrative account, and even tried the true administrator account. No luck. I tried on another V64bit HP system and there wasn't even a blink of problem. OH, I'm so confused. Do you have any suggestions?
You might need to burn the ISO to disk then choose to use the host drive to boot from and install.
virtual pc worked perfectly with my home premium system when I tried loading knoppix. No special set up.
Ok I have Vista Home Premium 64bit. Now I downloaded Virtual PC 2007 and it wont load an operating system. I have a linux disk that I want to install on to the virtual PC but it says that I need the additional plugins and when I try to get them it sayd I dont have an OS on my Virtual PC. So im kind of at lost of what to do here. I dont have a Windows XP disk I can get the ISO from and I cant LEGALLY download it for free.
for me it will install and run on home premium but i click new machine and the wizard pops up then disapears befor i can do anything then says an unsupported action has occured any help with this? mabye a diff. vpc software ps i keep hearing that virtual box.org has one that works with home prem. but not for me-same problem
virtual box works on vista home premium 64 bit virtual pc doesnt
Windows Vista Home Premium does not allow you to enable every feature Windows Vista Ultimate includes
Windows Vista Home Premium is design as the home version of Windows Vista
Vista Home Basic is designed for low budget users who surf the internet and dont care about recording DVD's and Watching TV
the Home Premium version is lot bettter than Home Basic
Vista Home Premium and Ultimate include Windows Media Center
Vista Home Basic Business and Enterprise and Starter do not