(It??™s been seven
years since Windows 2000.)
Windows Vista is available in several different editions, each of which is supposedly
intended for a different market. They??™re all the same version??”effectively,
the same software??”differing only in the toys included in the box.
The top of the line is the Ultimate edition, available at more than twice the
cost of the baseline Home Basic edition. The Home Premium and Business
editions include most of the extras found in Ultimate, but at a cost only
slightly higher than Home Basic. On the fringe, you??™ll find the Starter and
Enterprise editions, as well as Windows Home Server. See the ???What Does 64-
Bit Vista Get Me???? sidebar, next, for details on the 64-bit versions of Vista.
What Does 64-Bit Vista Get Me?
More bits gets you access to more memory. The processor inside your PC
communicates with your system memory (RAM) with numeric addressing.
Thus the maximum amount of memory a 32-bit processor can address is 232
bytes, or 4 gigabytes. Newer 64-bit processors??”not to mention the 64-bit
operating systems that run on them??”can address 264 bytes of memory, or
17,179,869,184 gigabytes (16 exabytes) of RAM.
(17 million gigabytes may sound like a lot of space now, but it won??™t be long
before you??™ll be taking baby pictures with an 8-gigapixel digital camera.)
Windows NT, released in 1993, was Microsoft??™s first fully 32-bit operating
system. But it took eight years before the platform, which had since evolved
into Windows 2000 and then XP, became mainstream.
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