Professional

From IexWiki

Information

Windows XP was designed to merge the 9x consumer/gaming line of windows and the NT corporate/power user line. The operating system was built on the heart of windows 2000, a reliable, if cold, operating system. When it was decided that the buisiness features of the NT series was too much for home users, a Home edition and Professional edition were made, with the professional edition having all the multimedia/visual abilities of home edition, but also with buisiness related content.

The resulting operating system was XP pro, stable, good looking (at least in comparison to previous windows) and with all the features of windows 2000 and more, for a seamless integration into a W2K environment. The differences between Home and Pro are in efficiency and features; Pro has active directory support, IIS server integration and remote control abilities (remote desktop, remote installation service, access control), encryption and roaming profiles.

Even more important for buisiness users, Pro had support for dual cpus, a growing market sector.

In use, Professional and Home are identical , except that Pro is slightly faster, and comes with a host of features designed for server/client computing. 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 Professional is available in 5 versions

There is the standard RTM version, which is Professional, 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, ME, NT and windows 2000. Server editions are not supported.

There is also an OEM version, which is the xp pro 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 Professional 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.

Professional 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.