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View Full Version : Windows XP v. XP Pro



Sean O'Gorman
02-17-04, 01:30 PM
I just bought XP Pro at my campus bookstore (it was $20...the first thing that made financial sense for me since I started coming here!), and I was wondering whats the difference between that and regular XP? I'm putting it on my dad's computer (it has WinME), because I'm sick of hearing them complain about it constantly crashing. I've bought them memory, removed all their viruses (somehow they accumulated 15 while my PC has never had a single one), removed their adware, etc. so I'm hoping it'll get their computer back in gear.

Ferdman
02-17-04, 01:40 PM
There's XP Home and XP Professional, no plain XP. The main difference is about networking. XP Pro is what you want if you need to join the machine to a domain. XP Home will only let you be part of a workgroup. Anything is better than Windows Millenium.

Chaos
02-17-04, 01:42 PM
I think with WinXP Home, you cannot create a network (it won't allow you to use that machine as a gateway to the net).

WickerBill
02-17-04, 01:48 PM
XP Home is a really nice version of WinMe. It's supposed to be better for video, etc., but Pro is hands-down the way to go.

Ferdman
02-17-04, 01:55 PM
$20 for a CD and license for Windows XP Professional? Buy as many as you can, sell me a couple at $20 a piece and sell the rest on eBay for $140 each. :D

devilmaster
02-17-04, 02:05 PM
$20 for a CD and license for Windows XP Professional? Buy as many as you can, sell me a couple at $20 a piece and sell the rest on eBay for $140 each. :D

i'm assuming he bought an upgrade of WinXP Pro....

Steve

chop456
02-17-04, 02:09 PM
Yeah Sean, if these are full versions of XP Pro you're talking about, I can use two of them. And to help out a college kid, I'm willing to pay as much as $25 each. ;)

Hard Driver
02-17-04, 02:09 PM
XP Home is a stripped down version of XP pro. Mostly what they did is take anything that a business would need, like more than peer to peer networking and took it out. The purpose is so that they can sell home users a cheaper copy and rape the business users to pay several times more. Business users can't use the cheaper version because it can't be hooked up to their networks.

Ferdman
02-17-04, 02:58 PM
i'm assuming he bought an upgrade of WinXP Pro....

Steve

Even for an upgrade, that's darn cheap. Its probably an academic upgrade, which the best price I can find is $68.

dando
02-17-04, 02:59 PM
$20!?! :saywhat: It's a $90 add on for a system through Dell! I'll take three. :)

Here's (http://www.microsoft.com/windowsxp/pro/howtobuy/choosing2.asp) the official comparison of the two from MSFT. Do not pass go, do not collect $200...go directly to XP Pro. Unless XP Home costs you $5..... :saywhat:

-Kevin

EDIT: More on networking differences here (http://techrepublic.com.com/5100-6313-1038781.html).

WickerBill
02-17-04, 03:02 PM
Campus prices (educational) are always basically the cost of the CD. $20 is very much accurate for the FULL version.

Sean O'Gorman
02-17-04, 03:53 PM
Sorry guys, I can only get one CD per semester. :)

I have XP Home on this PC (Pentium 4 1500 mhz), and couldn't ask anything more of it. Its the POS 667 Celeron on Windows Me that gives everyone a headache, so I bought XP Pro for that PC (they didn't offer XP Home). Hopefully it works out good.

racer2c
02-17-04, 03:57 PM
Sorry guys, I can only get one CD per semester. :)

I have XP Home on this PC (Pentium 4 1500 mhz), and couldn't ask anything more of it. Its the POS 667 Celeron on Windows Me that gives everyone a headache, so I bought XP Pro for that PC (they didn't offer XP Home). Hopefully it works out good.


Overclock that old Celeron. Pop it up to 1gh or so. I have an old Celeron 550 that I'm getting 850 out of. Every little bit helps. ;) Celerons make good overclockers because of their lack of L2 cache.

Sean O'Gorman
02-17-04, 04:12 PM
Overclock that old Celeron. Pop it up to 1gh or so. I have an old Celeron 550 that I'm getting 850 out of. Every little bit helps. ;) Celerons make good overclockers because of their lack of L2 cache.

Overclocking? I'm not familar with the concept, but now very curious. Go on...

racer2c
02-17-04, 04:20 PM
Overclocking? I'm not familar with the concept, but now very curious. Go on...

Quite an addicting activity with a surprisingly large community. I've been doing it since I first O/Ced a 120mhz Cirix to 150mhz back in '96. We used to O/C the cpu with jumpers that force more voltage to the cpu thus making the clock cycle faster. Lind of like hotrodding your ride! Then, about the year 2000, the system BIOS's started supporting overclocking in what they call a 'soft overclocking'.

Sysopt dot com is kind of like the Off Camber of cpu overclockers.

Would you believe 5 ghz out of a 3.1 Pentium 4? How about 9.9Ghz out of a Duron 500? :D

Link (http://www.sysopt.com/ocdatabase.html)

Insomniac
02-17-04, 05:17 PM
Quite an addicting activity with a surprisingly large community. I've been doing it since I first O/Ced a 120mhz Cirix to 150mhz back in '96. We used to O/C the cpu with jumpers that force more voltage to the cpu thus making the clock cycle faster. Lind of like hotrodding your ride! Then, about the year 2000, the system BIOS's started supporting overclocking in what they call a 'soft overclocking'.

Sysopt dot com is kind of like the Off Camber of cpu overclockers.

Would you believe 5 ghz out of a 3.1 Pentium 4? How about 9.9Ghz out of a Duron 500? :D

Link (http://www.sysopt.com/ocdatabase.html)

Just an FYI. Adding more voltage won't speed up the chip. Increasing the frequency or multiplier does that.

I wouldn't believe the 5GHz unless it was super cooled and 9.9Ghz, hehehe. :)

racer2c
02-17-04, 07:11 PM
Just an FYI. Adding more voltage won't speed up the chip. Increasing the frequency or multiplier does that.

I wouldn't believe the 5GHz unless it was super cooled and 9.9Ghz, hehehe. :)

True, just keeping it simplified for the audience at hand. Often you must increase the voltage to increase you multiplier. That will decrease cpu life, but I've never burned one out yet and I have some dinosaurs.

Oh, and Sean, I even O/C my graphic processor for a bit more umph in the game area!

Robstar
02-18-04, 05:27 AM
I have ME on the home PC (sux BTW)...
I can get XPPro through work for nada, but I'm wondering if it will lose anything I have already - ie: Mrs works in casting & has a demo of Final Draft Pro which she uses for reading scripts...

Railbird
02-18-04, 06:33 AM
My kid got mea XP Pro at the IUPUI bookstore for $10. I like to never got it installed in the old frankenputer but now it is running smooth.

I don't know squat about such things but it sure seems more stable that anything else I've used.

chop456
02-18-04, 07:17 AM
I need to bite the bullet and install XP. I have ME running on my Duron 700 desktop and it locks constantly. The laptop has Win98, which locks even more - twice a day at least. Granted, I'm only running with 192MB on the desktop and 64MB on the laptop, but c'mon now, I'm usually not running anything except IE when it bombs.

I'm hesitant to upgrade the desktop because I have a ton of crap on the HD, and it's my understanding that a clean install on a wiped disk is the way to go. Even if I didn't wipe it, I don't want to lose anything in the upgrade. I guess I could burn come CD's, but I'd rather not. The laptop has nothing important on it, so maybe I'll start there. After the cost of the upgrades and some memory, I might as well buy a new PC. Or make a down payment on the new Mac I really want.

rocket
02-18-04, 07:43 AM
Dude...just burn all the porn to cd. If your to lazy to do that just wipe it all out and start fresh...lotsa new stuff out there...err from what I hear anyway :D

I love my XP pro upgrade...stable as hell now. :thumbup: course I have the P4 1.8gig processor, 512MB ram, one 80 gig HD and I just upgraded it with a secondary 120 gig HD and a DVD drive. I need lots of space for all my recipes. ;)

Insomniac
02-18-04, 09:39 AM
True, just keeping it simplified for the audience at hand. Often you must increase the voltage to increase you multiplier. That will decrease cpu life, but I've never burned one out yet and I have some dinosaurs.

Oh, and Sean, I even O/C my graphic processor for a bit more umph in the game area!

For the newcomers, I suggest just tweaking the speed. Leave voltages alone until you're more comfortable. Also, you do technically void your warranty when you run your processor out of specification. And you also allow for more possibilities of hardware instability. Depending on the board and frequencies, you could end up running every piece of hardware out of specification putting those at risk as well.

4wheeldrifter
02-18-04, 11:00 AM
Hope this isn't a dumb question but will just changing the speed increase CPU temp or do you have to change the voltage for that to happen. I've got a beater 400Mhz Celeron machine at home that I've thought about tweaking but I think it has cooling issues already (crappy fan, small box jammed with extra HD, etc).

racer2c
02-18-04, 12:39 PM
For the newcomers, I suggest just tweaking the speed. Leave voltages alone until you're more comfortable. Also, you do technically void your warranty when you run your processor out of specification. And you also allow for more possibilities of hardware instability. Depending on the board and frequencies, you could end up running every piece of hardware out of specification putting those at risk as well.

Righto. Overclocking any processor, whether your main cpu or the processor on your graphics card is VERY risky and many, many people fry them the first time out. It's best to try it on an old box, and research as much as possible. Go with the verifiable mainboard/cpu combos that are getting the most stable results.

Ankf00
02-18-04, 01:26 PM
never read this thread until now, just got back a trip to the campus comp store for $6 XP pro

office 2003 pro was 12 bucks, but the older office xp was 15 :saywhat:

what are the pros and cons of formatting then installing vs just updating ME?

racer2c
02-18-04, 01:40 PM
Installing any OS on a reformatted drive is preferred for a few reasons. One being that it is usually much more reliable as the OS doesn't have older drivers/settings conflicting things. Another bonus when upgrading from the Win9x OS group to an NT (XP) based OS is that you can format your drive with NTSF as opposed to the FAT in the Win9x OS's. NTSF is a faster, more reliable and better handles larger hardrives and file sizes. Upgrading is quicker with less technical knowledge required and you can keep your files (you will have to keep XP on the FAT32 format though which takes away allot of what XP is about)

ilferrari
02-18-04, 03:56 PM
$20 for a pirate copy is quite steep, actually :gomer: . You should just copy someone's XP and then use a good keygen to activate it, and you'll have a "legitimate" copy that you can download any update for.

racer2c
02-18-04, 04:08 PM
$20 for a pirate copy is quite steep, actually :gomer: . You should just copy someone's XP and then use a good keygen to activate it, and you'll have a "legitimate" copy that you can download any update for.

Tsk, tsk. Piracy bad.

Sean O'Gorman
02-18-04, 05:40 PM
never read this thread until now, just got back a trip to the campus comp store for $6 XP pro

office 2003 pro was 12 bucks, but the older office xp was 15 :saywhat:

what are the pros and cons of formatting then installing vs just updating ME?

Just when I thought there was SOME aspect of this school where I was getting a deal, I read this.

If you think the office situtation is wierd, they informed me I could "rent" (WTF does that mean?) WinME for a semester. To quote Michael Andretti, "why would you want to do that?" :saywhat:

Sean O'Gorman
02-18-04, 05:44 PM
So far everything has run smooth on their computer, but I'm having issues with Internet connection. Uploads are fine (around 256kbps, faster than I'm getting on my computer), but downloads are horrifically slow. Somehwere around 170-180kbps, when my computer gets 3000+ kbps.

I'm pretty clueless when it comes to networking, so I don't know what to do. The computer with the issues is wireless, mine isn't, and the router is down here in my room. It says signal strength ranging from 47-60% ("very good"), and it used to get relatively normal download speeds before the upgrade.

Insomniac
02-18-04, 08:45 PM
Hope this isn't a dumb question but will just changing the speed increase CPU temp or do you have to change the voltage for that to happen. I've got a beater 400Mhz Celeron machine at home that I've thought about tweaking but I think it has cooling issues already (crappy fan, small box jammed with extra HD, etc).

Normally, the faster a CPU runs the hotter it is. That is why some people water cool now and a company used to (they still might) sold a refrideration type cooling system. Heat is the fastest way to kill things.

Insomniac
02-18-04, 08:48 PM
Installing any OS on a reformatted drive is preferred for a few reasons. One being that it is usually much more reliable as the OS doesn't have older drivers/settings conflicting things. Another bonus when upgrading from the Win9x OS group to an NT (XP) based OS is that you can format your drive with NTSF as opposed to the FAT in the Win9x OS's. NTSF is a faster, more reliable and better handles larger hardrives and file sizes. Upgrading is quicker with less technical knowledge required and you can keep your files (you will have to keep XP on the FAT32 format though which takes away allot of what XP is about)

I know most peoples favorite thing about switching from from FAT (or FAT32) to NTFS is if for some reason it crashes or the power goes out (and you don't have a UPS) you will never have to see it scan everything when it starts up again. It also supposedly fragments less. Overall NTFS is much better file system.

Insomniac
02-18-04, 08:50 PM
$20 for a pirate copy is quite steep, actually :gomer: . You should just copy someone's XP and then use a good keygen to activate it, and you'll have a "legitimate" copy that you can download any update for.

Man, talk about a bad first post.

Insomniac
02-18-04, 08:53 PM
So far everything has run smooth on their computer, but I'm having issues with Internet connection. Uploads are fine (around 256kbps, faster than I'm getting on my computer), but downloads are horrifically slow. Somehwere around 170-180kbps, when my computer gets 3000+ kbps.

I'm pretty clueless when it comes to networking, so I don't know what to do. The computer with the issues is wireless, mine isn't, and the router is down here in my room. It says signal strength ranging from 47-60% ("very good"), and it used to get relatively normal download speeds before the upgrade.

How are you testing the speed? Also, do you have the latest drivers for the wireless adapter? There are other "tweaks", but I wouldn't want to risk something going wong from my directions. You can take a look at www.broadbandreports.com. They have tools and tips that might help you out.

Sean O'Gorman
02-19-04, 12:21 AM
How are you testing the speed? Also, do you have the latest drivers for the wireless adapter? There are other "tweaks", but I wouldn't want to risk something going wong from my directions. You can take a look at www.broadbandreports.com. They have tools and tips that might help you out.

Went there, followed the instructions and changed the RWIN to a recommended value, but it didn't make a difference. The drivers I downloaded from the Linksys site were of a lower version than the ones currently on.

Sean O'Gorman
02-19-04, 12:53 AM
Nevermind, its working now apparently.

ilferrari
02-19-04, 07:14 AM
Man, talk about a bad first post.

Come on, what do you think he bought for that price?

WickerBill
02-19-04, 07:24 AM
Come on, what do you think he bought for that price?

He bought a completely legal teacher/student-license edition of a Microsoft product. Nearly every college campus on earth sells for about this price.

Insomniac
02-19-04, 07:29 AM
He bought a completely legal teacher/student-license edition of a Microsoft product. Nearly every college campus on earth sells for about this price.

Not my campus (when I was an UG). :( A lot have made agreements with Microsoft though. Lucky students.

Insomniac
02-19-04, 07:31 AM
Nevermind, its working now apparently.

Did you do something or did it miraculously fix itself?

Ankf00
02-19-04, 10:14 AM
format it is, then get to reinstall everything, wee!

is there an easy way to backup eudora mailboxes?

Sean O'Gorman
02-19-04, 12:43 PM
Did you do something or did it miraculously fix itself?

My dad was messing with it while I was at work last night.

Railbird
02-19-04, 07:58 PM
Your dad fixed it!?!?

Hey now, I'm a dad, it's our job to screw the computer up.

Ankf00
02-19-04, 09:45 PM
Your dad fixed it!?!?

Hey now, I'm a dad, it's our job to screw the computer up.

and here my older sis always instilled in me that it was the youngest sibling's fault... go figure.

Ankf00
02-20-04, 07:18 AM
ok, so installed XP, selected the non "upgrade" option and windows restarted in some dos utility XP install mode, i selected an option to change the partition on the HD from FAT to NTFS... fall asleep, wake up at 4:30 randomly ( :saywhat: ), complete installation,

XP loads and all my old files are still around, so I guess teh HD wasn't formatted, is this a problem?

nevermind: this is a very annoying problem, every app gives me an error saying i'm missing a .dll and then proceeds to run anyways... ugh.

Insomniac
02-20-04, 10:11 AM
ok, so installed XP, selected the non "upgrade" option and windows restarted in some dos utility XP install mode, i selected an option to change the partition on the HD from FAT to NTFS... fall asleep, wake up at 4:30 randomly ( :saywhat: ), complete installation,

XP loads and all my old files are still around, so I guess teh HD wasn't formatted, is this a problem?

nevermind: this is a very annoying problem, every app gives me an error saying i'm missing a .dll and then proceeds to run anyways... ugh.

Did you create a new partition for Windows XP?

Ankf00
02-20-04, 10:48 AM
Did you create a new partition for Windows XP?

I thought I read that it was going to reformat the selected partition (there was only 1 to select and it wouldn't let me delete it) into NTFS format

Insomniac
02-20-04, 04:06 PM
I thought I read that it was going to reformat the selected partition (there was only 1 to select and it wouldn't let me delete it) into NTFS format

It may have converted the partition to NTFS and upgraded it. I haven't inserted an XP install CD in a long time, so I can't remember. They ususally pop up a warning telling you that all of the contents of your drive will be erased and give you the choice of backing out. If you haven't installed all your other software and what not, you may want to consider doing it again to get rid of everything, especially since it doesn't work. I believe they refer to it as a "Clean Install". This article may help.

http://www.microsoft.com/WindowsXP/expertzone/columns/honeycutt/02october07.asp