Get Ultimate on Premium for Free

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Most Vista users opted for Home Premium and you should be patting yourself on the back for it because now you can get some features on Premium that are on Ultimate all for free. Most of them don't appeal to me but I'm not like most people so hopefully they appeal to all you readers. The three features are: Image backup, shadow-copy, and VirtualPC.
Image Backup
The Ultimate version automatically lets you make images that exactly replicate a disk byte by byte letting you easily restore a failed disk with the OS, settings, and files running as they did when they were running perfectly. There are 4 options for a replacement ranging from free-$50. Noron offers Save & Retore for $50, Acronis offers True Image for $29, and Discwizard or MaxBlast for free only if you have a Seagate or Maxtor drive which sadly I don't have. Another alternative is DriveImage XML which isn't the best but it'll do the job.
Shadow-Copy Files
The Ultimate version automatically backs up different versions of all the files you save so you can easily find it even after you've deleted the other copy. To replicate this software on Home Premium, a piece of free software called FileHamster will easily duplicate Ultimate's program. After saving a file, FileHamster will ask you to annotate(tag) the duplicated verion and optionally protect it from deletion.
VirtualPC
VirtualPC is offered by Microsoft for free which is surprising because they don't offer this on Home Premium. A Virtual PC is when you run one operating system behind another although you can run the same operating system if you like. You would download this because you might not be sure of a program so you run it in the virtual OS so your real PC won't get messed up or say when you browse the internet because tons of viruses and spam happen there.
If you don't have another OS then I recommend going to VMwares website and downloading VMware Player which is free and works like VirtualPC. The reason why this is better is because the site offers virtual OS usually for free. These aren't completely full versions of OS like for example there is one called DSL which stands for Damn Small Linux. To find these Operating Systems you need to go back to the home page of VMware.