With work picking up, I decided I needed something more mobile than my desktop computer and iPhone. I’ve been working from home for about five months, and it’s all new to me. I’ve learned a few things along the way, especially the fact that I need to be able to bring my work with me wherever I go. My desktop is pretty powerful, so I opted to look into netbooks. They’re ultra-portable and are perfect for my needs.

In shopping around, I noticed that the same model may come with various operating systems — usually Windows XP Home, Linux, or Windows 7 Starter. The netbooks with Windows 7 Starter were about $50 pricier than their counterparts. I thought, “why not? It’s a new OS, I could try it out.”

Before I made my decision though, I wanted to find out exactly what I was getting with Windows 7 Starter. That turned out to be very little, actually. It’s barely an operating system.

As shown, there is a lot of red. Everywhere. A lot of no. I understand that Microsoft’s initial idea was to provide a more compact OS for netbooks for performance reasons, but they can hold their own easily with Home Premium — which is the standard for laptop and desktop retailers anyway — and even Ultimate. In beta, they limited the Starter Edition to running only three applications at a time. At least they were smart enough to change that.

For those that want a quick rundown of what may be important to you, Windows 7 Starter does not include:

• Aero Glass, meaning you can only use the “Windows Basic” or other opaque themes. It also means you do not get Taskbar Previews or Aero Peek.
• Personalization features for changing desktop backgrounds, window colors, or sound schemes.
• The ability to switch between users without having to log off.
• Multi-monitor support.
• DVD playback.
• Windows Media Center for watching recorded TV or other media.
• Remote Media Streaming for streaming your music, videos, and recorded TV from your home computer.
• Domain support for business customers.
• XP Mode for those that want the ability to run older Windows XP programs on Windows 7.

Let’s get this straight: you don’t get the pretty Aero look, nor the highly touted Aero taskbar features, you can’t watch DVDs and best of all — no customization of WALLPAPER, WINDOW COLORS, or SOUND SCHEMES. Microsoft won’t even let OEMs change the wallpapers either. It’s funny, Aero is an acronym that stands for Authentic, Energetic, Reflective and Open. It’s disgusting.

It’s getting tiring, the extent to which Microsoft will tier their operating systems. Anyone remember the XP editions? Home and Professional. The main differences being in networking features. Every edition should have the basics that Home Premium offers, PLUS XP mode, remote desktop and file encryption — while not used too often — are all still extremely useful.

Now, if you have your eyes set on Windows 7, and you have the Starter Edition on your netbook, you will have to pay $119.99 for the upgrade to Home Premium. If you really want to go all out, Ultimate will cost you $219.99 for the upgrade.

I decided against the netbook with Windows 7 Starter Edition, to say the least. If there was no other OS option for the specific model I chose, it would have been a deal breaker, honestly. I’ll be running it with Windows XP and I may one day consider dual booting Ubuntu.

In the end, I’m a happy camper with my decision on netbook — it will arrive in a couple days. But for those out there shopping around, let this open your eyes to your choices. My desktop is currently running Vista Ultimate, and I may just go back to good old XP Pro there as well. Unless an iMac falls out of the sky.

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