Windows XP Home or Professional?
 

I'm getting ready to get a new computer. I've seen some good deals out there but most have the XP Home version. I'm a bit unclear what XP Pro offers in addition to the Home version and if its that big of a difference/improvement.

outside of possibly setting up a home network, i'm not going to be doing anything too crazy with the new machine.

looking for input...

Pro all the way

i use home edition,
but ive heard pro was good also.

i like xp way better than previous windows versions.

format it and put win2k on it.. win2k is 20 times better / faster.. xp loads like 50 - 100 programs soon as you boot up.. makes shit all slow

Pro works great for me.Never had a blue screen yet in over a year

yep, win2k everytime

If you know what your doing xp pro is just as good as 2000 but if your a dumbfuck get 2000 does not install 1000 pieces of crap that slows you down.

XP Sucks, run 2000 professional you will be much happier in the long run

XP pro is good...very good. If you keep it "clean" then it will run fast without errors.

I have XP Home on this machine, and Win2K Pro on the other. They both seem to need about the same amount of reboots. XP seems to crash less, but when it does, it's all the way. Win2K Pro crashes and you can usually save it, work your way down, and reboot... in XP, it's just gone. One minute you're working, and the next, it's shut down. Each has certain things I like and certain things I don't. If I had to choose....... hmmm...... probably would go with XP.

xp is aite i guess.. just turn off those stupid blue windows.. and turn it on classic view.. seems like it makes it twice as fast without all those stupid animations and stupid looking windows

unless i build a computer from scratch, win 2K isn't really an option because its not offered for installation at places like Dell or Sony.

i've used win pro on a laptop since january and i find it to be slightly more stable that win 2k. win pro has crashed once, and i think that may be related to the power management stuff on the laptop. when i used win 2K, it seemed to go down once a month or so...which was great compared to the daily crashed i had before on win 98.

seems like most people are recommending xp pro. maybe i'll just buy the box and if it has the home version, just buy a cheapo upgrade version on ebay and install it...

XP pro all the way... it used to be a toss up for me, between XP pro or win2kpro .. but once I started fine tuning XP pro I never went back to 2kpro... because XP can be just as fast but has a lot of nice features... besides that 2kpro is just too dated looking... I mean it looks almost the same as 95-winme

20 times faster, BULLSHIT, at worst XP runs 5% slower than Win2000, IF THAT. And if you've got a 2.5 ghz cpu with 512 of ram like me you won't ever notice a fucking difference. If your on your old 800mhz CPU then yeah use win2000 cause your old machine will slow you down and you need everything you can get out of it.

I much prefur XP over win2000, it has a much nicer feel and I find it crashes less as long as I keep it clean.

I like XP

I've never had to reboot once when I upgraded to XP Pro. :thumbsup XP Pro just has some additional business related features, otherwise it's the same as Home.:thumbsup

<img src="http://fuckbill.blewme.com/fuckbilly.jpg">

i concur....

however. i like xp pro. 2000 pro was great, but when it crashed, it seemed permanent. there were a lot of dumb little quirks. xp pro is very stable though, quite happy with it. xp home is junk... i kinda liken it to windows me... but with an updated interface. waste of time, anyone i know that has bought a machine with home on it immediately upgraded to pro.

pro

ok ok ok, I admit it ...

I also run a copy of winXP pro as well....and I have a win2k box, a win98se box, a linux box, a freeBSD box....


xp is pretty good, I actually like it better than win2k, but if I had to pick a favorite windows release it'd be a toss up between win98 and 311 :)

:thumbsup :thumbsup

FreeBSD r0x0rz. i need to build a new desktop for it...

...YEH it does ;)

:thumbsup :thumbsup




'ports are your friend'

I upgraded from Win98 to XP Home a few months ago and am impressed by how stable XP is :thumbsup

I will be buying a notebook shortly and would also be interested in hearing any benefits associated with XP Pro. It was my understanding that Pro is only necessary if you want to network a large number of boxes. Are there other benefits?

i know that's so true, but i'll admit it, i don't use the ports much :(. dunno why, but mostly i just use FreeBSD for servers and stuff.. so mostly i'm lame and use /stand/sysinstall. just never learned them i guess and am being lazy. next time i build a desktop though i'll make sure and learn them, it's such an integral part of the os.

right on...

the only other *nix style os that has some groovey 'ports' like setup that I've run into is Debian linux, and Gentoo

Debian's apt-get is nice

haven't messed with gentoo yet, but one day when I'm seriously bored I will...I hear it's a little quicker on the hardware suport than freebsd and very 'bsd-ish' in it's setup/useage...

right now i'm trying to convince myself to setup a FreeBSD lan server. i've been planning on tossing my 2 100+gb drives in a lan box to get them out of my machine, ultimately to migrate to a promise raid 5 setup.. like the sx6000. windows is so much easier, but i really wanna run FreeBSD. the only problem is i want it to operate like a win box, hence the need for samba.

last time i tried getting samba to run on a redhat 7 box, it took me several days and i finally just gave up. they way i had it set up it _should_ have work... but redhat is so squirrely, maybe it was the install of rh...

have you ever gotten samba to run? i'm basically looking for 1-2 lan servers to back up all my media files, and one to back up all my important work data for some fault tolerant goodness. it would be very easy to do in windoze... but not efficient.

funny you should mention setting up a fbsd box as a windowzy box as well...

I've never gotten samba setup either...

but just broke down and bought a book that supposedly has a fairly useful section on how to setup fbsd as a workstation ...

I'll let you know how it goes...


I too have only used fbsd primarily as a server....but am interested in setting up a secksy workstation out of it...

XP Home is great unless you add new hardware (like the super sonic graphics card my hubby couldn't live without). The home edition maps your machine and thinks your trying to sneak a second machine on the license and locks up cold....time to reformat. We were told by our tech that Pro doesn't have this limitation. Hope this helps :-)

heh... basically what i'm going after when i get a few billz paid off. a new desktop for work (this one is going to go to just games), a shiny new FreeBSD desktop, and a couple lan servers. i've even been thinking about upgrading my webserver here at home... but really, it doesn't need it. it's a 550 k62 clocked at 450 with 196 megs ram and a pair of 6gb hdds. it used to run a 13-person 24/7 game of halflife, run a mail server i used a lot, and http. it worked fine doing all that, and since i don't run a game server right now, it's more than enough to serve what i do.

anyways, if sams can publish a 600+ page book on samba, you know it's a bitch :(

I use pro and love it

pro fo sho!

See what your needs are.

http://www.winsupersite.com/showcase...p_home_pro.asp

xp pro!!

:thumbsup