Building a new rig...  Is there any real reason to spend $40.00 extra on the professional?

For the general consumer, Premium is good enough.
 
However, for more information on further differences, see here (see the two tabs at the top; the third isn't a comparison between 7's flavors).
 
Professional has a few more advanced features (networking, encryption, Windows XP VM, Backup, etc.) but chances you won't use them.  For $40 more, it's really up to you since it's not incredibly more than Premium.

there all the same more or less, they just hide or lock stuff down
from what I seen/done  you can enable a lot of the stuff with some work
just don't get starter, there's a lot of work involved in getting things to work like in other versions

The biggest difference IMO is the amount of RAM you can use, Win7 Premium limits you to 16GB where Pro can use up to 192GB.

I agree.

wdflyer


The biggest difference IMO is the amount of RAM you can use, Win7 Premium limits you to 16GB where Pro can use up to192GB.

I completely forgot about that one
but not many of us need more the 16gb's and I'm not sure if you can work around that one
I'm betting that's in the kernel

wow - im getting 16 gb right now... doesn't leave me much wiggle room for upgrade :/

VegetaCreeper


wow - im getting 16 gb right now... doesn't leave me much wiggle room for upgrade :/

what do you need all that ram for ?
if you need that much ram why use windows ?

I thought you had 24GB of RAM. If you're already RAM capped, get the other OS, or maybe grab a free alternative OS.  I have 12GB of RAM and I get low RAM warnings on a daily basis.  24GB seems nice right now. 

Kanti


  I have 12GB of RAM and I get low RAM warnings on a daily basis. 

 
what do you guys do ????????????????????????
I do have 7 on my system and it idles at 750~800mb and loads at about  4.8gb

Kanti


I thought you had 24GB of RAM. If you're already RAM capped, get the other OS, or maybe grab a free alternative OS.  I have 12GB of RAM and I get low RAM warnings on a daily basis.  24GB seems nice right now. 

didn't you check your PM earlier? 

I sold that system! Gone - "Gone like a freight train, gone like yesterday, gone like a soldier in the Civil War - bang bang..."
 

So many systems, I can't keep track :P
 
as for what do I do: one word - Firefox.

VegetaCreeper

wow - im getting 16 gb right now... doesn't leave me much wiggle room for upgrade :/

I just got done dealing with the same issue, I bought 3 of these kits and threw 6 sticks into each of our two X58 based systems so they both have 24GB now, but I had to upgrade them to Pro to be able to use it all.
  

voodoo do-er

wdflyer

The biggest difference IMO is the amount of RAM you can use, Win7 Premium limits you to 16GB where Pro can use up to192GB.

I completely forgot about that one
but not many of us need more the 16gb's and I'm not sure if you can work around that one
I'm betting that's in the kernel

Yeah, I don't think you can do anything about it, Windows Premium will see all of the memory that is installed but only report 16GB as usable.
 

voodoo do-er

Kanti

I have 12GB of RAM and I get low RAM warnings on a daily basis. 

what do you guys do ????????????????????????
I do have 7 on my system and it idles at 750~800mb and loads at about  4.8gb

+1, what are you doing?, are you sure your system is configured properly?

Kanti


So many systems, I can't keep track :P

as for what do I do: one word - Firefox.

I never see it go over 600mb's
and that's with 10's of pages open and many vids and flash games running
right now I'm on my win7 lappy I have 3 pages open and FF 15.0a1 is only using 250mb's

firefox 12 here, 7 tabs open and about 30 other in inactive groups (not currently loaded), memory usage 330MB
 
... however with firefox 8-9 I used to see memory usage of around 1.3GB (!!!!) with similar number of tabs

I might have a bad stick or two of RAM,  I get applications crashing at around 9GB even though my system has 12GB.  Unless that is normal behavior.  I'm utilizing over 8GB of RAM right now and all I have running is IE FF and MS word.  Sometimes I leave MS flight idling 24/7, but that's only like 1.5GB of RAM.

Kanti


I might have a bad stick or two of RAM,  I get applications crashing at around 9GB even though my system has 12GB.  Unless that is normal behavior.  I'm utilizing over 8GB of RAM right now and all I have running is IE FF and MS word.  Sometimes I leave MS flight idling 24/7, but that's only like 1.5GB of RAM.

something is not right, run memtest86 and clean your os out
I ran game, FF, multiple Vbox, compiz and a lot of junk on a system with 4gb of ram
I know it was on linux, but still

I barely see over 3GB RAM used no matter what I do ... however I usually do not leave games idling in background though ...
 
can you run LinX 0.6.4 in ALL memory mode for at least 5-10 runs without errors? it's the best thing for testing both CPU and RAM I know of ...
http://www.gigaflopd.com/downloads/linx/

I also tend to have 200+ tabs open.  Perhaps I should have mentioned that earlier.  IE uses 100-500MB per tab as well...

Kanti

I might have a bad stick or two of RAM,  I get applications crashing at around 9GB even though my system has 12GB.  Unless that is normal behavior.  I'm utilizing over 8GB of RAM right now and all I have running is IE FF and MS word.  Sometimes I leave MS flight idling 24/7, but that's only like 1.5GB of RAM.

My laptop has 6GB of RAM but I never get low memory warnings no matter what I am doing.
 
What does your system properties show for the RAM installed?, Do you have your Windows virtual memory file turned off or set to a small size?
 
Have you checked Windows Task Manager for extraneous running programs or to see what your memory usage looks like?

right now I have
 
IE 3.5GB
FF 1  GB
and 4GB of OS and other services. 
 
did you know that calc uses 12MB per instance?

Unless you plan on doing some serious video editing, 16GB should hold you over for like 5 years. I didn't see a need, saved my money and went with Home Premium.

That's what they said when I bought 12GB 3 years ago and I eat through it like Chinese buffet.  Buy a ton of ram, make a ram disk, slowly decrease its size as your RAM demands creep higher and higher.

You're using a RAM disk?
 
 

I rarely ever use more than 4Gb of RAM. Right now using 2.25Gb with 3 browsers open, playing videos on youtube, and a TON of processes. Only time I ever see mass RAM usage is when i'm editing photos.

blacksapphire08


I rarely ever use more than 4Gb of RAM. Right now using 2.25Gb with 3 browsers open, playing videos on youtube, and a TON of processes. Only time I ever see mass RAM usage is when i'm editing photos.

Same here, only time I am using lots of RAM is when I'm editing/converting video.

I have 24 GB of ram on Windows 7 pro, But unless i am rendering or running a VM i rarely go above 6gb, I mainly got that much because it is pretty cheep right now.

heres something you guys are missing about this question
 
they have found out that proffessional and especially ultimate actually slows down your machine with more goodies then premium does making premium more efficient and a better simple choice unless you need the added stuff

Fight slow down with more cycles, SSDs, and of course more RAM.

Whatever you go with make sure you unlock the master admin account..... Theres nothing like being a basic user on your own pc...