Ultimate and Enterprise are the top-level editions of Windows 7.

It supports activation over a KMS server. It adds the ability to join a domain and other features commonly used in business environment.

Professional replaced Vista's Business edition and includes all features of Home Premium.

It includes the fully featured Aero theme and Windows Media Center.

Home Premium is a standard edition aimed at the home customer segment and is most commonly preinstalled on new computers and laptops.

This edition came in x86 and 圆4 versions. It includes the Aero theme, but some of its features are disabled.

Home Basic is available in emerging markets, such as India, Mexico, Brazil, Russia and others.

Supports 2 GB of RAM at most and comes in x86 version only. It does not include the Windows Aero theme and doesn't support changing the desktop wallpaper and visual styles.

Starter is a low-end edition available only through OEMs, who usually preinstalled it on netbooks, tablets and cheap laptops.

Windows 7 was shipped in the following SKUs: Ĭontrary to popular belief, the previous code names of Blackcomb and/or Vienna refer to an earlier effort intended to succeed Windows Vista, which was canceled in early 2007 due to time and feature constraints, and was instead replaced with the Windows 7 project.

This was the project's code name and was eventually used as the final name as well. The name 'Windows 7' comes from the version number of Windows Vista (6.0) being incremented by one to get 7.0. This is the last version of Windows that supports processors without PAE, SSE2 and NX (Update KB4088875 removes support for processors without SSE2) and the last version of Windows that received a Service Pack from Microsoft. For Professional and Enterprise users, paid extended support will end on 10 January 2023.Ī pre-RTM build, 7600.16384, was speculated to be the final version of the product but had a flaw in Internet Explorer 8 which prevented it from shipping. Mainstream support ended on 13 January 2015, while free extended support ended on 14 January 2020. It replaces Windows Vista and was replaced by Windows 8. It is one of Microsoft's most popular operating systems, still running on 14.8% of desktop and laptop computers as of September 2021. Windows 7 improved performance on older hardware, while also improving many areas of the Aero user interface. Windows 7 has NT kernel version 6.1, making it a minor update to Windows Vista. It is intended to fix many of the issues users perceived with Windows Vista. It is the eighth operating system in the Windows NT operating system line. Windows 7 is an operating system developed by Microsoft, released to manufacturing on 22 July 2009 and general availability on 22 October 2009.

Windows 7 build 6801