Vista Ultimate versus Vista Business versus Vista Home Premium

OK, go for the weirdest situation created by Microsoft to date.

Vista Business (installed on one of my notebooks) works fairly normal. I installed it for the scanning and fax capability that comes with Vista Business. The Microsoft scanning software won't work with my older scanner, but that's OK, as the old scanner software will allow me to scan documents onto my notebook. The only good news here is that the Microsoft Fax software does function. God only knows what scanners will work with the Microsoft Scan software.

I recently bought an HP (made by Asus!) Pavilion with a Quad Core processor. The PC came with Vista Home Premium installed. This version of Vista worked pretty well. I had also recently "upgraded" my daughter's PC from Vista Home Basic to Vista Home Premium. Basically Home Premium seems to work much better than Home Basic.

Now I recently had to "upgrade" my new PC to Vista Ultimate in order to run Virtual PC 2007 for my work. Talk about a step backwards! As opposed to Vista Home Premium, Vista Ultimate takes several minutes after booting up the PC to connect to the Internet. Very annoying. In addition, Ultimate forced me to create a static IP address for this PC as it couldn't seem to handle accepting or working with an automatic IP address from the router. Oddly enough, Vista Home Premium had no problem connecting to the Internet instantly and receiving an automatic IP address.

As one wag put it, "Windows Vista users are the largest beta testing group in the world."