XP Home Vs XP Pro: PLEASE read this before you decide! - Page 2

Remote Desktop is reason enough for me to love XP Pro. I use it all the time. Right now I have my 9300 up, with terminal sessions to my Desktop downstairs and my work PC as well. Smooth as silk (much better than Go to My PC and free to boot).

XP Home has the Remote Desktop client, it just won't host a standard RDP session. Microsoft would have a tough time explaining why every OS from Win95 onward can run the RDP client except XP Home

I'll put in another vote for MCE over both Pro and Home. It includes *almost* all of Pro + a few extras. You can always kill off the services that you don't use. And Dell sells it for less than Pro.

I got pro so I can network with all of my different college connections. Sure I could probley do the same things on Home, but it's seamless on pro.

I'll go with MCE as well.

OK, for the reasons unknown to me XP Pro with quite a few services disabled is much more stable and efficient than Home.
I've compared them side-by-side.

I have quite a few ideas why is that so, but it would take a very long post.

He who loves meat and software should never be allowed to watch how they are made..

MCE *is* Windows XP Professional. The ONLY difference is that it's had the Media Center added to it, and it's had it's domain functionality crippled. Aside from that, it is the Professional build.

To further that point, you can buy MCE for 149, but pro costs 199. The reason MS crippled MCE is so that corps don't buy the MCE version for 50 less than the pro version.

So, to that end, if you have a network at home/work, wherever, and you want to participate in a domain (ie, turn your MCE into Pro with the MC added), you can perform the following hack to re-enable domain participation for MCE:

http://www.extended64.com/blogs/rafa...icles/404.aspx

Voila. MCE is XP Pro with added Media Center functionality. Perfect.

Guys...the short answer is...if anybody here is so concerened about that minimal performance decrease, which is inarguably there if more processes are running in one version than the other, that person would know how to ctrl-alt-del, and stop those processes for the purposes of perhaps those extra 10 3dmarks we all at times want.

I personally use Remote Desktop daily, the encryption feature is wonderful, and the multi-lingual support is excellent, so Pro was a good decision. Essentially, for any college student I would recommend the upgrade, but for home gamers it's not worth the extra cash. Network use is really what should make the decision.

Actually there can be some advantages to using Pro at home. Especially if you have more than one user. Installing applications on Pro for all users is easier to setup. ( one set of settings for all ). I had another computer come with XP home ( which ive never used before ) and had to go to each user login to setup things like Zone Alarm and such.

If you just need the remote, you can download it . Personally Like Doc, ive used VNC ( which eventually became RealVNC. ). If you need security then you can use SSH2 (which is also downloadable) which will allow you to tunnel RealVNC through, thus making it harder to decrypt sessions for password scraping. You dont need much support because all its doing is allowing direct access to the desktop, so whatever languages you speak or use are 1:1. One of the nice features of it is that you can control it, so you can open the port to the firewall and you allow only those ips or macs to access it, on top of password and encryption.

If all the component names are throwing you off and you still dont know if you need Either than consider this:
Both operating systems have the same gui systems, just one is optimized for networking and sharing.
They will both play games just fine. Its a function of processes managed by the services app that will bother your performance.
It will be enlightening for the average user to look at each process and do a google on it. This way they get an idea of what its doing, do they need it, and should they just turn it off. ( or is it a virus ;0 ).
Even XP Home has a lot of junk you can do without ( Remote Registry editing ???). Of course be sure to make a note of what you turn off. Sometimes you can turn off the air supply and will need to turn it on .

- Not certified- definitely certifiable.

Well, I'm definitely not a common user, but I bought Professional over Home because it's definitely a lot easier to mess with account policies.

There's been a whole security initiative where the average user shouldn't have administrative priviledges just to run Office, Counter-Strike, or whatever. Unfortunately, that won't start until Vista comes out.

So for XP, just mess with the account policies so you're simply a power user, but you have most of the power of an Administrator - then run with that account.

Since a lot of worms, virii and trojans do a lot of messy things 'cause most Home and Professional users run as administrator, this blocks them and makes them visibly blow up in your face.

And for the times you actually need to run as a full administrator - there's always the runas command!

Someone said Home doesn't support multiple processors, but what about hyperthreading where you have 2 virtual processors?

XP Home only supports one physical processor and XP Pro supports two physical processors. Physical does not mean logical though and dual core and HyperThreading are logical, not physical. A dual core may have two cores but it is still only one processor. It could have ten cores and still be one processor as long as their all in the same housing.

MCE Rollup 2 has DVD Changers support? I have Sony 777es connected through RS-232 to one of my desktop HTPC's.
Will this thing support it? If so, I am sold immediately!!

No

There's a lot of things going on with Windows Pro that aren't really listed or advertised as an advantage over Home or MCE. For one, Windows Pro has a better memory management system and tests have shown that, while it be little, games do perform a few frames per second better on Professional than they do on home.

Besides the memory management feature in Pro, Pro also handles networking a lot better. If yo're big on online gaming, wireless connections are better handled and managed through Pro.

If you're a true enthusiast, there's no reason why you should not get Windows Professional.

What he says. Not the monument.