Ultimate has bitlocker - Home Premium does not). Anything beyond that seems to be more suited to small businesses and professional executives and the like who might need more practical functionality and maybe the extra added bit of security (e.g. If all you ARE doing is playing games (amongst the usual sending e-mails or word documents and tasks of lesser significance - to a gamer at least) then I would say Home Premium is your best bet.

You on the other hand might not even want to. I wanted more so I chose to upgrade, thought I'd made a mistake, and then ended up liking the fact I had upgraded (it's buried here in the forum somewhere lol). Last thing you want to do is screw up your system with an incompatible OS.

You have to be aware of what your hardware is capable of, as well as whether or not you can install a 64 bit Operating System. I think the rest pretty much depends on your system specs more than the operating system in your case. I won't be very technical here temote, but I will say that when I obtained my laptop with Windows 7 Home Premium that I asked for a system that would allow me to perform graphic design using Adobe Photoshop, Flash as well as playing media (films, music etc) as well as doing other basic tasks.

Windows7 home edition