Home Edition

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Information

Windows XP was designed to merge the 9x consumer/gaming line of windows and the NT corporate/power user line. A problem facing the developers at the time was the same one that had prevented the superior NT architecture superseeding 9x before; there are many features of NT that home users don't need.

The previous attempt to solve this (Windows ME) failed with its 9x core and so the microsoft developers created windows xp home edition.

This version of windows was the full NT architecture, but with many of the buisiness oriented features removed. It had the full suite of multimedia and internet applications that XP professional edition had, but without what were thought to be uneeded services. This led to a superficially resource-light o/s (though this does not mean more efficient) and a more manageable experience for home users. It was also in effect a marketing ploy; the cut-down home edition was priced lower, and actually functioned slower, giving power users the incentive to fork out for Xp Pro.

In use, home edition is almost identical to Pro, except slower in most areas, but with less features such as remote-desktop, offline files, encryption, active dir, etc. To decide which to get, look at that list. If you dont understand what the terms mean, home edition should be fine for you, unless you don't like the delay. The slight lag of home edition has been almost removed in windows xp SP2, which blurs the cosmetic and efficiency differences of the two editions.

Availablity

XP Home is available in 5 versions

There is the standard RTM version, which is home edition, through and through. It comes with a manual, a box, etc.

There is the upgrade RTM version, which is identical to the standard version except you must have a cd version of a previous windows. This can be windows 95, 98 or ME. For home edition, upgrade from NT/W2K Pro are not supported.

There is also an OEM version, which is the xp home disk, minus the fancy box and manual. This is designed for system builders, but is just as functional, and at a far lower price.

Finally, a recent addition has been the Home edition N upgrade and retail packages.

This was done to please the European ocourt and is exactly the same as Home standard, but without windows media player.

Home edition was available in Gold, SP1 and now SP2 varieties. The differences between these date-variable releases was the inclusion of service packs and hotfixes. Nothing else was changed.