Another reason that you might want to get Professional over Home is to use language packs at the OS level (granted, it's not something you'd do frequently). This comes in handy especially if you've customers that might have PCs set up in different languages. We'd run into occasions where a program would run OK under most "European" language, but would crash in certain places in Asian language environments. Sometimes they can be really baffling (until you realize some of the underlying mechanisms involved) -- for example, we'd have compiled code (i.e. in EXE, APP and FXP format) that would work fine in English, French or Spanish, but would crash with syntax errors in Chinese, Japanese or Korean language environments.

Windows 7 was a bit odd in that Professional edition didn't give you the language packs ability -- you had to get Ultimate. The pricing for this did baffle me. If you got the off-the-shelf copy of Win7, Ultimate was generally only about $20 more than Professional (both as a new install as well as OS upgrade). However the price difference in going with a Win7 edition upgrade was much steeper (notably going from Professional to Ultimate was almost as much as going from Home to Professional).

It appears with Win 8.x that they have gone back to just Home and Professional editions and not the Home Basic, Home Premium, Professional, and Ultimate as seen in Win7.

>Another reason (beside Craig's) to get Professional: you need professional to run hyper-v, which is handy for having older versions around, and also putting up Linux (CentOS, which is the free version of RedHat Enterprise Linux, is supported by hyper-v).
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>Hank
>
>>I'm about to buy a new pc with Windows 8.1.
>>Is there a recommended version of Windows to get (Basic, prof...)?
>>My main concern is that it should be able to run my old VFP 9.0 apps without changing them.
>>
>>Rich