Windows 7… “Media for everyone !”

From the betas of Windows Vista until the start of September I ran the Ultimate edition of Windows, rather than the enterprise edition. We had a perfectly good enterprise edition as a network installation, but in Vista there one some features missing from enterprise and from time to time I needed to talk about those. I never quite understood the thinking that video never needed to be edited in a business context.

A check of the version comparison page shows the way things have have changed for Windows 7. Professional is a super-set of Home Premium; Enterprise and Ultimate are effectively the same super-set of professional, just with different licensing. So Media Center and so on are in the versions found in business. I don’t see many IT departments thinking “oh great we’ve go Media Centre on every PC” for desktop PCs in the office you might turn it off (via Windows features in control panel). But think of the road warrior carrying a laptop round the country: plug in a USB TV stick (I have one from Hauppauge but there are others out there – prices now start at under £20) , and all the Freeview (or other DVB-T) channels are watchable from a hotel room or wherever: so is anything recorded on Media Center at home

Like quite a few things Media center has been given an additional polish between the Windows Vista an Windows 7 releases : for example it colour codes different program types, and for movies on TV it will also pull down a miniature of the movie poster. The movies menu shows all the upcoming movies with their posters.

During the beta I discovered “My Channel logos” : it changes the text for the channel names with their logos which you can see in the left picture: well worth the $3 donation the student who created it is asking for I’d say.