XP Pro vs XP Home

[halfadder]

Most of my friends, and most of the people on this website say the same thing about Windows XP Home:

"d00d, XP Home is t3h suxx0r, you need XP Pro!"

Yet, after a lot of googling and a lot of reading it seems to me that the only real difference for my needs is the lack of Remote Desktop in XP Home.

I only have a single CPU and I don't use a login/password and I'm not part of a domain. I don't need encryption. So it seems to me that XP Home is all I really need. Am I correct?

 

[Matthias99]

Somebody asked this last week. Please search.

It's mostly the security/networking features (EFS, domain support), Remote Desktop, and a few other things you'll probably never use. Performance is identical. They both support dual-core and HyperThreading (a common misconception; you only need WinXP Pro for boards with two CPU sockets).

 

[halfadder]

Cool. I guess I'll go with XP Home and use the money savings to buy another gig of ram!

 

[scottws]

Personally, I hate working with XP Home due to the lack of features. I use Remote Desktop multiple times daily. Therefore I'd chose Pro 100% of the time. But that's just me.

 

[Canterwood]

Sounds to me that XP Home is really all you need.

I think you're making the right choice saving the extra cash to spend on ram.

 

[Varun]

Remote Desktop is certainly addicting.

Also XP Pro has a limited version of IIS.

There are also other products that will allow all of the features of Pro, other than domain support, if you decide at a later time you want to host a website or do a remote session on your computer.

I use Pro and love it, but if I build a computer for anyone I always put Home on it.

 

[spherrod]

Go for Home definitely, doesnt's sound like you need the few added features of Pro so the extra gig of ram will be more worthwhile

 

[JackMDS]

LOL, when it comes to Computer advice there is three approaches.

The ignorant advice. (Cat5e cable gets hotter then CAT6 so get CAT6)*. :shocked:

The macho computer geek advice. Wow, man only two 320GB hard Drive, go for Tera. :roll:

The functional advice.

The following page provides the functional advice; the rest is up to you.:thumbsup:

http://www.microsoft.com/windowsxp/home/howtobuy/choosing2.mspx

:sun:

* I did not made it up it came on on a network Forum.:brokenheart:

 

[mechBgon]

Also, if it matters, XP Pro will have a longer support life because it's a business-class OS. In fact, even Win2000 Pro's support life will exceed WinXP Home by a couple of years.

 

[kylef]

This one missing feature that kills XP Home in my view is:
"Access Control ? restrict access to selected files, applications, and other resources."

In other words, the "security" tab in Explorer for file objects is missing.

This is particularly annoying because the default filesystem for XP Home is NTFS, which always uses security ACLs for operations. So if a file ever had its ACLs set inappropriately (i.e., by a broken app), you wouldn't be able to fix it from Windows Explorer. I think the official story is that you have to boot into safe mode to change ACLs. (In other words, when in Safe Mode, Windows Explorer magically sprouts this Security tab once more.)

I think you can still set these object ACLs programmatically, so if someone wrote a file manager replacement that handled ACLs, you could probably work around the problem.

But it's just annoying enough in my opinion to make me write off XP home.

 

[scottws]

I know what you mean. I back up data to another PC in the workgroup, since that person doesn't really install new programs or download anything or otherwise have huge things stored on the PC. So I created a shared folder for myself, and backup there. I wanted to restrict access to the folder on the local machine so nobody could get to (or delete!) the backup My Documents for instance, but since this PC is XP Home, I can't do that.

 

[nweaver]

another thing that can cause problems is simple file sharing. I'm not the biggest fan of that "feature" )

 

[acityDweller]

if youre asking what the differences are, you probably wouldnt miss them if you kept with home. Dont switch just because "your friend" raves about it... Do what's best for you. Yep, save your money and use it on more ram...