Section 1.3. Windows XP Home and Professional Editions

1.3. Windows XP Home and Professional Editions

Although only the Home and Professional editions of Windows XP are covered in this book, there are actually six editions of Microsoft Windows XP:

• Windows XP Home

• Windows XP Professional

• Windows XP .NET Standard Server

• Windows .NET Enterprise Server

• Windows .NET Datacenter Server

• Windows XP 64-bit ^[3]

  ^[3] For more information on the 64-bit editions, see http://www.microsoft.com/windowsxp/64bit/.

Although all these editions of XP are similar, only the Home and Professional editions will be of interest to end users, while the others are intended for use in large corporations (Enterprise) as high-end server platforms.

The Home and Professional editions of Windows XP are nearly identical; the only differences are additional features found in the Professional edition that will appeal to power users and small businesses. The primary differences, aside from the price and the color of the packaging, are shown in Table 1-1.

Table 1-1. Differences between Windows XP Professional and Home editions

	Windows XP Home	Windows XP Professional
Multiple processor support	None.	Single- and dual-processor systems are supported.
Networking	Built-in support for peer-to-peer networking for up to five computers.	Built-in support for peer-to-peer networking, plus support for joining a Windows NT domain.
Backup software included	Yes. [4]	Yes, plus Automated System Recovery (ASR).
Dynamic Disk support	No.	Yes.

^[4] Not installed by default. See "Backup".

In addition, Windows XP Professional includes the following tools and accessories (all documented in Chapter 4):

• Administrative Tools (in the Start menu and Control Panel)

• Boot Configuration Manager

• DriverQuery

• Group Policy Refresh Utility

• Multi-lingual User Interface (MUI) add-on

• NTFS Encryption Utility

• Offline Files and Folders

• OpenFiles

• Performance Log Manager

• Remote Desktop

• Scheduled Tasks Console

• Security Template Utility

• Taskkill

• Tasklist

• Telnet Administrator

There's nothing that Windows XP Home edition can do that the Professional edition can't do; in other words, the Professional edition is a superset of the Home edition.