Has anyone tried this edition in a business environment? Or even home environment? Please give some feedback if you have.

"Much like its predecessor, Windows XP Starter Edition, this edition sells in 139 countries such as Russia, Brazil, People's Republic of China, Nepal, Indonesia, Mexico, Pakistan, Philippines, and Thailand. Microsoft does not make it available in developed technology markets such as the United States, Canada, the European Union, Australia, New Zealand or Japan (although users can install a 30 day trial-version from the 32-bit DVD).[4][5] Vista Starter has significant limitations, such as allowing a maximum of three applications with a user interface at oncep, not accepting incoming network connections, a watermark in the corner of the screen, and a physical memory limit of 1 GB. Unlike other editions, a 64-bit version of Starter Edition has not been released.[6] It supports AMD's Athlon XP, Duron, Sempron and Geode processors, and Intel's Celeron, Pentium III processors and certain models of Pentium 4. The usable portion of the hard disk has a limit of 250 GB. Starter Edition comes with some locale-specific desktop wallpapers not found in other editions of Vista."

Yea, I read that after I made the thread. I needed it for my dad's PCs at work, but it looks like they'll be going with Home Premium.

Private company with three employees. Not really much of an IT infrastructure. :)

Why go with Vista now that 7 has been available for 17 months at retail?

As long as you know that the company will never grow.....

Always a pain to see small businesses that grow that then implement kludges and hacks that don't fit standards.

Easier to go with Pro now than to worry about upgrading machines later especially if the license comes with the computer. They are substantially cheaper with the computer than bought seperate.

Tell that to Bentley and Microstation. They still can't sort of the compatibility problems. It will never grow. My dad and his colleague (did I spell this properly?) are working together (and are the owners of the company). Just a small local company dealing with geodetic stuff.

Well, that sounds offensively terrible. My verdict: Avoid at all costs!

It's not available in markets outside of poorer countries, so you won't find it hard to avoid it.

I don't see the wisdom in limiting programs to 3 in any circumstance. You're also unable to change the wallpaper, being limited to a "localized" image (that is that you will see a giraffe if you're African).

The application limit was lifted in Windows 7 Starter, as the intention for that system was that it would be used for netbooks and low power devices. You're still unable to change the wallpaper, though, being stuck with the super bright Windows 7 logo.