Hi Brian,
I am a comparative novice in XP matters. Although I was a computer
professional for about 30 years, I did not have to delve too much into the
works of the operating systems. (My forte was programming.)
However, my recent experience may be of interest. I have had a desktop
running XP Home for some time (over 2 years), and recently (about 2 months
ago) bought a laptop running XP Pro.
I found that most things were the same. The article referred to Anando
certainly spells out a lot of features of XP Pro, although on reading it, I
found a lot were common to XP Home.
The one thing that stood out for me when I started to use XP Pro was to do
with networking. I decide to network the two computers to allow sharing of
the Internet and EMail via the one ISP. This has worked very well, apart from
a few setup hiccups (to be expected, I suppose).
But, after I had networked the two computers, I thought that it would be
useful to use file sharing so that any changed file was stored in one place
and not two, which involves "synchronising" between the two.
This works fine for the laptop with XP Pro. I can schedule files to be
synchronised at logon and logoff and it can also be done at any time in
between (provided the desktop computer is connected to the network).
This means that files originally stored on the desktop are updated from
later versions on the laptop. (These are stored on an Offline Folder on the
laptop). It also happens in reverse. (Later versions of files on the desktop
are written to the Offline Folder on the laptop.)
However, trying to do it the other way doesn't really work. I cannot
synchronise files between the two when using the desktop (with XP Home).
There is no Offline Folder facility.
This may be a minor problem, but it does mean that I cannot access files
from the laptop when using the desktop unless both are connected, or unless I
have put all files I want to share on the desktop.
Sorry for the long dissertation. I hope it helps.
