has available: Starter, Home Basic, Home Premium, Professional, Ultimate, and Enterprise. The Starter version is aimed primarily at low-end netbook devices, and the Windows Home Basic version is only available in emerging markets, so we can rule those two out right away.

Microsoft thinks that it is doing you a favor by essentially making . A quick browse through the systems available from Best Buy or Amazon shows that almost every system available now comes pre-installed with Windows Home Premium, with a significant percentage being the 64-bit version of Windows Home Premium.

Windows Home Premium is OK, but it lacks key features. Microsoft has this habit of adding all kinds of eye candy and multimedia bells and whistles to the home version, but and customization capabilities. I chalk it up to an effort to provide a dummy-proof entertainment system and be more like Apple, but the result is that consumers get an inferior version of Windows that doesn't come close to the Mac OS X experience.

Microsoft isn't Apple and Windows isn't Mac. If Microsoft focused more on providing the best version of Windows for consumers and less on trying to be cool or dummy proof, it would be doing itself and you both a favor.

Microsoft aims the cream of the crop of the security features at enterprise customers. Granted, they need them as well, but enterprises tend to have IT administrators and technical support personnel who install, manage, and oversee firewall and antivirus products, monitor the network for outbreaks, and provide security remediation and cleanup when necessary. Home users don't have those resources so they need the operating system to be as secure as possible by default.