Which Windows 7?

Currently running XP Pro and XP Home on my two PCs. At some stage in the not too distant future I'll need to move to Windows 7. Looking at the various versions there seem to be two relevant ones, each with an N variant.

It seems ot be a question of W7 Home Premium or Professional, can't see any point in Ultimate.

I connect the two PCs to permit file & printer sharing and file synchronisation, I use IIS on the XP Pro PC for web site testing. I'm not interested in gaming, in streaming data explicitly, in watching TV on-line. Unsure about XP mode, whether it'll be relevant or not. Again not sure of the benefits of being able to back up to a home network.

Then there are the N variants of each of the versions. Again. not sure of the pros and cons of that feature, just says it makes it easy to create a home network.

Thoughts appreciated.

I think the N versions come without Windows Media Player.

XP Mode runs XP in a virtual machine, in case you have any apps that don't run on Win 7.

That's corret N means no media player i personally have 7 pro but thats because i use xp mode and also i do active directory testing and needed to domain join option pro is also handy if you plan on using over 8gig of ram i think but not 100% sure you need pro to use IIS as well although as i say im not 100% sure hope this helps

Ash

All the info here.

Thanks, it doesn't give the IIS situation but I found that here. I can't currently see anything IIS-wise to need the Professional version, my web sites are really very simple, mainly PHP and HTML.

http://learn.iis.net/page.aspx/28/installing-iis-7-o...

With win7pro you also get group Policy ability, this is missing in Home Premium. Pro is the bets upgrade from xp pro

In reply to a post by cavillas:

With win7pro you also get group Policy ability, this is missing in Home Premium. Pro is the bets upgrade from xp pro

How will that benefit the OP?

I've got a laptop (W7hp), PC (XP pro sp3) and second laptop (W2K sp4).

The W2k laptop is being used as a print server. The printer sharing was a bit of a pain to set up as all the relative drivers on the W7 laptop had to be installed via Windows Update but apart from that they all talk to each other without any issues. With the new O2 router I have a USB HD plugged into the router so it is even easier to share and backup files.

Indeed, there's only one user - me.