What about Windows unsold or Windows I'll stick with XP?

Whats most scarey from the screen shot there is that they have a version below home basic. How miffed are people going to be buying a new PC for the first time and wondering where all the advertised features of Windows7 are.

I don't think this is wrong at all. It is just the same as the car manufacturers advertising a car based on the top of the range model and then offering a basic version with none of the goodies. Nobody can complain that you can buy a whole operating system for less than the price of 2 PC games - but if you get the cheapest version then you must expect that there will be features missing. Otherwise what do these people think is in the more expensive versions? The clue is in the name "Basic, Premium, Ultimate"... I'm sure people would start complaining is MS only released 1 version of their OS that cost £180 with everything in it.

Yeah, never mind that it confused customers and resulted in a massive class action suit against them. Pfft. Market segmentation is great!

The class action suite was purely to do with the stickers describing Vista Capable / Vista Certified PCs and was brought about by Intel needing to get their graphics chipsets validated for Vista use even though they weren't really good enough. There has never been a law suite based on the naming conventions of the operating systems themselves. After all what are the people suing going to say? "I didn't realise that Basic meant Basic". Mind you in a country where people can Sue Macdonalds for serving hot coffee, I suppose anything is possible.

i understand if they want to suck every penny out of consumers, then the different versions of win7 would make sense, business sense. simple as that, they are in control, there's just no avoiding it. perhaps ultra power users might run alternative OS but then many of us dont have that tech know-how.

so i think companies in that league should be a little more "sharing" & "caring" in that regard when they claim they want to spread the vista experience or win7 experience or whatever. be abit more responsible for humanity, it's either a cheap full featured home-user or a expensive server ver only, yes u can laugh off this naive and probably impossible request.

but then coming from a little feebble human computer user . i dont have the power other than to beg for mercy..sigh..

windows 7 starter will be the version for developing countries i imagine

Why soo many versions? You really, only need about 3 different versions with the options at the installation screen, allowing disabling certain things.

Still, i never understood the need for the OS, which was supposed to be a ground work for all the apps. Like the foundation of a building. You never see the BIOS turning into a 4gig dvd size software, do you? So why does OS like windows keep going fatter and fatter - eating up more resources each time trying to look pretty?

I really would like that power used to run my other productive software packages that matter! So long as dumb, fresh users keep demanding a pretty OS to take them by the hand, we'll probably keep getting this sort of result from MS, even in the future.

As the processing power is gained by the CPU makers, MS insists on using it all up leaving the apps. to run as on the earlier system even though you paid for a newer hardware... Makes no sense to upgrade - costs aside.

Go into your system BIOS right now and take a look... Basic and well effective, never crashes and does what it says on the tin, as it were.

I just hope they allow people to switch things off and i don't like chatting clients and media players installed by default!

Give me a basic, black background with a simple text screen, and I'm happy. I just need something to help launch my apps. as quickly as possible. Even games or video editors, does not matter. I need the power utilised on those not OS!