Windows 10 editions and features

- You know the Windows, you know and love hasn't always looked this way. Back in the day it took on quite a different appearance. Let's take a look at Windows through the ages. Ah, Windows 1.01, the start of something great! Ah, Windows 3.11 when we started getting into more like user controls and options and network folders and I still don't know how to play Minesweeper. Windows 95, this is when it all starts coming together. We get a nice beautiful desktop comin' in, a nice Start Menu. Things really start coming together for Windows 95. Windows 98, everybody's going to remember that 3D pinball. Again, we had another nice desktop refinement here, some new icons added, and it really was a great and stable OS. And if you're an IT guy, an old hat, you remember that Windows 2000 Professional fondly. Still to this day, one of the best operating systems to get your hands on as a systems admin. Ah, everybody's classic favorite Windows XP, still to this day in use, even though they've stopped supporting it. But this thing brings back a lot of good memories. Eh, this is Vista. We don't like to talk about it. Ah, and then we have Windows Seven, still found in a lot of systems out there in office environments and other places. You may encounter this, but for purposes of the exam, you only really need to worry about 10 and 11. Then we had the wonderful 8.0 when Microsoft brought in these live tiles and everything else here that really just kind of made it (sighs) a little too chaotic for me. And also they got rid of our Start Menu at the first part of Windows Eight before 8.1, so not too bad. Now, Windows 10 comes in a bunch of different editions. We have Home, we have Pro, we have Pro for Workstations, we have Enterprise, all sorts of men. You're going to need to know each one for to pass the CompTIA A+ exam. And if you sit down at a machine and you're not exactly sure which one is installed there, you can quite simply just run the winver command, W-I-N-V-E-R, and hit enter, and it will show you not only your specific edition but also the build that you have. There are some things you need to take note of, because different editions have different features and access to different things. So let's take a look at some of the Windows 10 editions and some of the common features that you're going to need to know that are either included or not included, depending on the version you choose. So over here I want you to take a look at this chart. We have our Windows 10 Home, our Windows 10 Pro, our 10 Pro for work groups and our 10 Enterprise here. And you'll see that we have, for instance, for Windows 10 Home, the minimum amount of RAM, because remember, every operating system you install is going to have a minimum hardware requirement that you have to meet. So we have 30 for the 32-bit version of Windows 10. We have one gigabyte of RAM. And for the 64-bit we have two gigabytes of RAM. But you'll notice that a lot of the extra features that you may be interested in, in Windows 10 are not included in Windows 10 Home. You can only join a work group, right? You don't have the ability to join a domain. You can't do remote desktop, no group policy, so that gpedit.msc doesn't really apply here to Windows 10 Home. BitLocker, right? We've come to use BitLocker and BitLocker To Go quite a bit these days and unfortunately that's not available in Home. And another thing to take note of is that Microsoft has recently, with the last few versions of Windows, implemented something called a long-term servicing branch or a long-term servicing channel. And what that basically means is, look, I know you, if you've used Windows, you've noticed it updates quite a lot, right? And so those updates can kind of cause a little bit of chaos, if you know a driver issue, you have driver issues or issues with other applications or whatever it may be. So those long-term servicing branches and long-term servicing channels basically state that all the updates for those will only be done in certain intervals. So like for instance we'll only get updates every six months or every year, or every two years unless they're major security fixes. And this, you'll notice that if we look down here at Windows 10 Enterprise, it's actually the only one that isn't in that long-term servicing branch. So if you're in a corporate environment that actually you know, doesn't want the chaos that sometimes constant Windows updates can do, you definitely want to go for the LTSB or LTSC version of Windows which in this case is Enterprise. Now, if we look back up at Windows 10 Pro, we notice that we get a lot of those features that we were missing. And so your RAM right, that's your random access memory, your minimum hardware requirements, so you're going to need to actually run these different editions and domains, well, we can either join a local work group on certain editions of Windows, or we can actually join an active directory domain and take use of all those group policies and all those real cool features that active directory has. Remote desktop protocol, that's useful for if you need to either remote into someone else's machine or let them remote into you. You might need to, you know, exchange files that way, or you could provide them some sort of support, fix something for them. It works out. It's very useful RDP, Group policy enables you to actually set at that active directory level a policy that, you know, handles changes or any kind of configuration and just set it all the way across the board on all of your systems. Windows 10 Home, unfortunately does not handle group policies. BitLocker enables us to actually use Microsoft's BitLocker technology to encrypt our data on our hard drive, which is great because it actually offers another secure layer. You know, it's an extra password that someone needs to know to be able to sign in and access your data and decrypt it. And then we already talked about the LTSB. So one more thing before we close out here. I want you to know that Microsoft has a ton of information on their sites. And I'm going to be putting all these in the resources off to the side here. But, you know, if you want to come down and get more information on what specifically is included or discluded with your edition of Windows, all you got to do is come to this site and take a look. And Microsoft does a fantastic job of listing what is included or not included in every edition of Windows 10!