Noticing the A$200 price difference between XP Pro & XP Home just makes me wonder how crippled is XP Home?

Personally i couldn't afford XP Pro so i wonder if i should bother at all?

Cheers.

Remember that you cannot buy an upgrade from Win2kPro to WinXPHome. So unless you're buying the full edition (which would be much more expensive) you're going to have to go with WinXPPro.

That is, unless he also owns a copy of 98 or ME that he might have been using before upgrading to 2000. The only limitation will be that he can't "upgrade" install the XP Home over 2000 Pro and will have to reformat the hard drive first and then provide the 98 or ME disk at the appropriate point in the installation to prove that he owns it.



It's a personal judgement call as to whether there is sufficient extra benefit in XP over 2000. To me, it is because of the added game compatibility and the fusion technology (i.e., no more DLL hell!!!!). We also have multiple users of the same computer in the house, and XP has simplified the login somewhat and added a "Switch User" feature so that someone else can log in without disturbing whatever I happen to have left running. Remote assistance is valuable to me, and I've insisted that all of the physically distant family members whose computers I sometimes support switch to XP so that when they have problems I can get in and deal with it. Funny thing is, I believe that a lot of the problems will go away simply from having switched from a 98 installation to an NT kernel.

Next issue... Home vs. Pro... Again, a judgement call. The single most serious difference is the ability to log into an NT/2000 domain server with the Pro edition. At home, few of us do that. Then there is the encrypting features in NTFS that are only in Pro, which most of us don't need. The remote desktop is cool, but not often needed at home. Finally, there are a few tools that aren't in Home that are in Pro -- including the "Backup" utility. That was the only missing piece that I would have actually NEEDED to back my critical stuff up to my server, so I'm out looking for a workable freeware backup tool. I don't know whether I've missed any other major differences.

Some will *NEED* the Professional edition even at home, and most of us will NOT. Take this for what value you can get out of it and do what will work best for you. Save the $$ if you can. I did.

some of us have dual processors and therefore need pro