About Windows XP Professional
| As stated previously, Windows XP Professional is an operating system designed for the workplace. It provides a 32-bit operating system based on the Windows NT (and later, Windows 2000) kernel, plus it's able to support more legacy 16-bit applications than Windows NT or Windows 2000 can. Windows XP Professional features an updated desktop interface, and includes additional networking features that enable user management, security policies, and local logon scripts. FeaturesThere are two types of Windows XP features: those that are included in both the Home Edition and Professional versions, and those that are included only in Windows XP Professional. The basic features are
Because Windows XP Professional is a business-oriented operating system, it includes features that are superfluous for a typical home user. As you may guess, security tops the list of the additional features in the Professional version. In Windows XP Home Edition, for example, each user is considered equivalent to being an Administrator on the computer, and is granted Full Control rights to all local resources. The only other option for a user is to have Limited rights, which chiefly allows that user to view and edit his own files and desktop and may prevent the user from installing applications. A computer running Windows XP Home Edition cannot join a domain, whereas a computer running Windows XP Professional can join a domain and participate in domain group memberships. Security in Windows XP Professional is expanded to include hidden administrative shares such as C$, and offline files. A hidden share is one that is available for connection but is not seen when someone browses the network. Offline files enable users to access cached copies of files when they are not connected to the network and synchronize changes the next time they connect. These are not available in Windows XP Home Edition. Plus, Windows XP Professional allows file encryption on the local disk through the Encrypting File System. Remote Desktop is a Windows XP Professional utility that, after it is enabled by an administrator for one or more users, enables those users to take remote control of the computer from a different location, basically a single-session version of Terminal Services. Although you can initiate the Remote Desktop session from a computer running Windows XP Home Edition, you cannot share the Remote Desktop session unless you are running Windows XP Professional. This enables a user to connect to her office computer from home, regardless of which version of Windows XP is on the home computer. Because Windows XP Professional is intended for processor-intensive applications, it does support up to two processors, whereas Home Edition supports only one. Another hardware-related feature of Windows XP Professional is dynamic disk support. In the interest of quickly recovering a failed computer and returning the business user to a productive state, Microsoft added Automated System Recovery (ASR) to the Backup utility. ASR-enabled backups can recover a system even if the hard drive fails and must be replaced. ASR is not automatic, as its name implies, and must be configured. Network-enabled features are the sole domain of Windows XP Professional. Remote Installation Services (RIS), used to remotely install the operating system on client computers, is supported only on the Windows XP Professional version, as well as the System Preparation (Sysprep) utility used to create unattended installations. In addition, Windows XP Professional supports roaming profiles for users to receive personal settings regardless of which network client they log on to; plus the Internet Information Services (IIS) software for sharing a personal website; Group Policy; and IntelliMirror, which can be used from a domain to manage change and configuration. The History of WindowsThe PC has transformed over the past 20-odd years from a standalone computer that performed little more than word processing and spreadsheet functions to a portable multimedia machine supporting a diverse set of applications. Microsoft has been at the forefront of this development, providing the most ubiquitous operating system to power PC applicationsWindows. Microsoft first announced its new graphical operating environment named Windows 1.0 on November 10, 1983, and then released it in 1985. Windows 2.0 followed in 1987. Those early versions of Windows were hardly memorable; however, most people remember Windows 3.0 (released in 1990) because of its wide popularity. Microsoft began integrating peer-to-peer and domain networking support in Windows for Workgroups 3.11, released in 1993. That same year, 32-bit networking was introduced in the form of Windows NT 3.1. NT stands for "New Technology," and 3.1 referred to the fact that the interface resembled Windows 3.0. From the point that Windows NT was introduced, Microsoft split its operating systems into three basic groups: home user versions, corporate user versions, and server versions. The home user versions grew from Windows 3.x to Windows 95 (released in August 1995), to Windows 98 and Windows Millennium Edition (Me), and finally to Windows XP Home Edition. The XP stands for "experience." The corporate user versions were Windows NT 3.1, Windows NT Workstation 3.5 (released in 1993), Windows NT Workstation 4.0 (released in 1996), which had the new interface matching Windows 95, Windows 2000 Professional, and finally Windows XP Professional. The server versions all were based on the 32-bit Windows NT kernel and released at roughly the same times as the workstation versionsWindows NT 3.5 Server, Windows NT 4.0 Server, Windows 2000 Server, and Windows Server 2003. Each server release also had additional server versions that provided additional services and/or hardware support for high-end corporate uses. Today's Windows XP represents millions of lines of code and some 20 years of research and development since the earliest versions of Windows. Windows XP Service PacksWith millions of lines of code in any application, you can imagine that there will be some error that was not caught in testing, especially considering how many different uses that millions of people will find. This was something that users have expressed concerns about since the early days of computingno program has ever worked perfectly under every circumstance, and the frustration of not being able to get work done because of some bug in the software generated complaints. Microsoft's solution to bugs was to create bug fixes, also called "hotfixes." After a certain amount of time, there were so many hotfixes that people had to install that Microsoft packaged them into a single installation called a "service pack," or SP for short. Of course, hotfixes were still created after the first service pack and eventually another service pack had to be created to incorporate all those fixes. One opportunity that service packs gave the developers was to release additional features. Each service pack is cumulative, so when you install a service pack, you need to install only the latest one released to gain all the fixes and features in previous SPs. Note Service packs are not necessarily the best thing since sliced bread Each service pack usually causes a few unexpected errors with a variety of applications and/or hardware devices. As an administrator, you should install service packs with the same amount of caution that you would use to deploy the operating system itself, by first testing it in your own environment with your own applications and hardware, and then running a pilot test of the update on a group of (forgiving, you hope) users. After you are sure that the service pack will cause fewer errors than the ones that it fixes, you should roll it out to your users. SP1Windows XP SP1 was released with more than 300 bug fixes and also incorporated changes demanded by the settlement that Microsoft reached with the U.S. Department of Justice. The main focus of SP1 was to improve security and reliability of the operating system. It included some new capabilities such as USB 2.0 support, new hardware support, and Windows Messenger v4.7.
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SP2
EAN: 2147483647
Pages: 193