Midnight sees the start of the Windows 7 pre-order offers where, for a limited time, Home Premium will cost £49.99 and Professional will cost £99.99. If like me you paid the Ultimate tax for Vista and didn’t get much for it, well, you’re not getting a discount for Win7 Ultimate either – but all Ultimate gives you this time around with Win7 is language packs and and Bitlocker. There’s been some confusion if BranchCache and DirectAccess are limited to the Enterprise and Ultimate editions – who knows, as MS don’t show the Enterprise editions on their comparison page – heck they don’t even show IIS on there – wikipedia has them listed, but then, well, who knows about accuracy there. Still, for the majority of developers Professional is going to be all you need.
However, this being Europe, there is NO UPGRADE. Installing Win7 E is a complete reinstall job (It used to be if you got an E you felt all loved up – not this time) and you’re going to end up without a browser as well (can you tell how unimpressed I am?). MS warn in the small print
Please get a browser from Microsoft or a third party and have it on a CD/DVD or another device so it's ready to install after the Windows 7 installation is complete.
Amazon have their bits ready to go at midnight.
If you don’t like Amazon MS will take your money directly and there are a bunch of other vendors should you want to shop at Dixons, PC World, Comet and so on. All online – so you don’t have to make up computer parts to send the sales people on a wild goose chase when all you wanted was an SD Card.