What Is Not in Windows XP Professional

Windows XP Professional is almost completely a superset of Windows XP Home Edition. In other words, virtually every feature found in Windows XP Home Edition is also part of Windows XP Professional. Thus, it's no longer necessary to decide between multimedia features and corporate networking as you would with Windows Me and Windows 2000 Professional.

About the only major feature missing from Windows XP Professional is Windows XP Home Edition's simplified user configuration. Because Windows XP Professional is designed for corporate networking it uses, as you learned earlier in this chapter, corporate-style security settings which are much more comprehensive than those used by Windows XP Home Edition. Otherwise, every feature in Windows XP Home Edition is present in Windows XP Professional.

Like Windows 2000 Professional, Windows XP Professional is limited to ten simultaneous connections when it's used as a Web server, and it supports either one or two processors. You will need to use Windows 2003 Server (the server family based on Windows XP) when available if you need support for more users or more processors.