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Asked: 2009-07-24 05:09:35 +0800 CST

Is XP Home Edition good enough?

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We (a small company) have just bought a couple of HP Minis for
mail/web/office tools.
The HP minis were preinstalled with XP Home Edition,
and we are considering XP Professional or Vista Business.
Do you know which extras we get from XP professional/Vista Business compared to XP Home?

Edit: Will stick with Home Edition (and explore Ubuntu)

ubuntu windows-vista windows-xp

8 Answers

  1. Best Answer

    The big thing with Home is that it cannot be a part of a Windows domain - only a work group. That's basically it - so do you need domain support or not? (Some examples are group policies, fine-grained security on a file-system and user level, VPN/remote connection at log-on).

    Differences according to anime-Paul
    Differences according to a Technet article

    The HP mini should handle Vista fine in my experience of trying it so I would argue not going the XP route if you chose to upgrade - using an eight year old operating system however cool it is isn't recommended if you have other options. But that's the security buff in me talking, you might ignore him at will ^^

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  2. As stated by others, the main difference is you cannot join a domain. However, that can be worked around with pGina.

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  3. Also, with XP (either Home or Pro) we are very soon nearing end of life for that OS. Which means that no more updates from the Microsoft, even critical ones.

    Maybe Windows 7 (when it comes out in few months time) would be suitable, it's actually less taxing on hardware than Vista.

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  4. I would say "no". You can hack around the restrictions but then you're straying deep into "unsupported" territory. For corporate networks - no matter how big or small - safe and predictable is the way to go every time. Leave the hot-wiring for your personal machines at home.

    In your case you may not need an AD domain now, but you might in a year or two down the line. You might also want to set local group policies, proper NTFS permissions and so forth.

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  5. The one big reason to use XP Professional instead of Home: Home cannot join Active Directory Domains.

    Vista on a Netbook would be a chore, I don't recommend that. Either XP or Windows 7.

    Apart from that, it's only minor stuff like IIS.

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  6. Various networking things, development-level servers (IIS, FTP, yadda yadda). In Vista, you additionally get some bloat, a slightly nicer looking desktop and encryption.

    If you're really just in it for the web-facing desktop tools (browsers, email, etc) you could do a lot worse than spending a few hours, even a day, playing with Linux and see how that goes for you.

    If you've got proprietary apps you need on windows, that obviously isn't an option but otherwise it's something to keep in mind once you're growing and you have to maintain a dozen or more computers. Windows licenses get expensive fast.

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  7. Some of the deficiencies of XP Home can be overcome by making it think it is XP Pro, such as joining a domain. The link below outlines how to make the conversion.

    http://www.mydigitallife.info/2008/06/13/convert-and-upgrade-windows-xp-home-to-professional-without-reinstalling/

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  8. I've only ever used Pro until I recently was helping my father. We needed to do a quickie backup of some files on his Vista notebook. So I said let's just point Windows Backup (Backup and Restore Center) at the cavernous space available on his desktop over the LAN. Nope, XP Home doesn't allow the necessary permissions to be set on the shared directory. Brain dead!

    XP Home network share error http://netstrata.com/images/XPhome.jpg

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