Vista Basic or Vista Home Premium? Is there a big difference?

[treacletart]

i'm looking at what look like 2 well priced toshibas on the tesco direct site - this one is £329 and this one is £399. The cheaper one looks like it might actually be a little faster but comes with Vista Basic the £399 one has Home Premium... I know most will tell me Vista's horrid anyway, but I can't hold out for windows7 I need a nice cheap laptop now because mine is in its last death throws.. any advice?

[MaryBS]

Its £58 on the microsoft website to go from basic to premium, so you can always upgrade.

I was told to go for the premium when I bought my desktop, because of all the multimedia options. Whether this is worth the extra money to you, only you can say.

Personally I would be uncomfortable with buying a laptop from Tesco because of the apparent lack of support if you have any problems.

[WebDude]

Might be worth pointing out that with a little over a month to go to release of Windows 7 on October 22, quite a number of PCs may have an upgrade option to switch to Windows 7.

However, wherever I've looked, the free upgrade does not apply to Vista Basic.

Also perhaps worth considering is that machines with at least 2 GB (4 GB if poss) are more likely to be upgradeable.

Many of the smaller, cheaper, laptops / notebooks / netbooks have been sold with Windows XP under a special licencing deal with Microsoft (which would probably prefer not to still be selling Windows XP, given we're some time on from the launch of Vista) where XP could only be sold on machines with 1 GB of RAM and a processor speed below 2 GHz.

That way, those machines are likely to be 'locked' to XP (as there's insufficient memory to make them easy to upgrade to Vista or Windows 7) and they will be looked down on as 'out of date' from 2011 (or even 2010, by some).