XP Home or XP Pro On LAN?

[Susan]

On a pretty uncomplicated home LAN between two machines, a router, and
cable modem; for games, file sharing and printing; and planning to give
Mozilla Suite (Firefox and Thunderbird) a go instead of IE again would both
machines using XP Home make all the sense needed or am I still better off
installing Pro on the new laptop hdd even though the desktop already has
Home? I'm not aware of getting anything I need out of Pro over Home but I
am not sure. I have the opportunity of making both machines Home OS if it
makes any sense to do so. Would I be better off making both machines Pro
OS? Although I played with Pro's Encryption there was no need for it and
it actually has caused me some recoverable grief.

Thanks.

 

[AndrewJ]

On a pretty uncomplicated home LAN between two machines, a router, and
cable modem; for games, file sharing and printing; and planning to give
Mozilla Suite (Firefox and Thunderbird) a go instead of IE again would both
machines using XP Home make all the sense needed or am I still better off
installing Pro on the new laptop hdd even though the desktop already has
Home? I'm not aware of getting anything I need out of Pro over Home but I
am not sure. I have the opportunity of making both machines Home OS if it
makes any sense to do so. Would I be better off making both machines Pro
OS? Although I played with Pro's Encryption there was no need for it and
it actually has caused me some recoverable grief.

Thanks.

Use Home, same thing really without multi CPU support, file encryption
and VPN networking things aimed at enterprise.

 

[Papa]

I have 4 PCs in my home network. Three of them use Home, and the fourth use
Pro. Aside from differences in performance (each of them has a different
CPU), they all work the same - on the network or off, as well as on the
internet or off.

 

[sdeyoreo]

I think Pro includes IIS, Internet Information System, a webserver
program , Linux Apache. With it, you can act as webserver, running
server-side software like ASP, PHP scripts, dig itno databases, like
MS Access, etc. It's really cool if you want to try out writing web
stuff. If you have the extra $100, go for it.

 

[User N]

[] I'm not aware of getting anything I need out of Pro over Home but I
am not sure. []

You should have come across product comparisons by now, but I'll
throw these two links out anyway:

http://www.microsoft.com/windowsxp/home/howtobuy/choosing2.mspx
http://www.winsupersite.com/showcase/windowsxp_home_pro.asp

Be aware that there are various free alternatives for some of the functions
that would seem to require Pro. For example, if you want to be able to
remotely access another machine, there is RealVNC, TightVNC, etc. If
you want to run a webserver (note: you might not be allowed/able to run
a public one on your cable connection) there is Apache, and if you so
desire, PHP, MySQL, yadda.

 

[Paul]

I have 4 PCs in my home network. Three of them use Home, and the fourth use
Pro. Aside from differences in performance (each of them has a different
CPU), they all work the same - on the network or off, as well as on the
internet or off.

IIRC Pro can be a member of a NT domain whereas Home can't. Unless you
have any NT4/Win2K domain/active directory servers on your home network
this is a feature you probably never need.

 

[Susan]

Be aware that there are various free alternatives for some of the functions
that would seem to require Pro. For example, if you want to be able to
remotely access another machine, there is RealVNC, TightVNC, etc. If
you want to run a webserver (note: you might not be allowed/able to run
a public one on your cable connection) there is Apache, and if you so
desire, PHP, MySQL, yadda.

I'm sticking with Home for both machines. Network Connection Wizard works
just fine.

Now, if I could only understand why M$ or Symantec puts an empty
\xerox\nwwia\ in Program Files...? Thanks for the help.

Susan

 

[Paul]

I'm sticking with Home for both machines. Network Connection Wizard works
just fine.

Now, if I could only understand why M$ or Symantec puts an empty
\xerox\nwwia\ in Program Files...? Thanks for the help.

I've got that too (XP Pro). You can't delete it as the folder is in use
by something or other. AFAIK I have never installed a Xerox printer
driver...