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As a student in ECE (Electrical and Computer Engineering) Dept. at my school I've got a subscription to MSDN-AA. As a Result I can get a free copy of XP Pro. I'm wondering if the upgrade will be worth it, and would like people's oppinions.

Here are my hardware specs:
Dell Inspiron 5150

- P4 (Mobile) @ 2.66GHz
- 512 MB DDR
- 40GB Hard Drive (13.5GB Free)
- GeForceFX Go5200

Mostly the machine gets used for taking notes in class, office work, surfing, low intesity games (Spider, Civilization 2 Gold), listening to music, watching DVDs, light image editing, and a few higher intensity games (Rise of Nations).

To top it off, having my maching out of commission for more than a weekend at this point is out of the question if that effects the advice I'll get.

Thank you all in advance.

XP Home is crippled XP, simple as that. But with all OS installes I recommend Formats to make the Hard Drive Gods happy.

Arguably you won't see much of a difference.

Mr Bean wrote:XP Home is crippled XP, simple as that. But with all OS installes I recommend Formats to make the Hard Drive Gods happy.

I really didn't (for some unknown reason) know that Home is little more than a crappy version of Pro, but with 24+ Gigs of stuff (only 10 gigs or so is music, and even then I have all but maybe 200 megs of that on the original CDs) I'm wondering if the time needed to fully backup everything( I know I need to do it anyway), and do a wipe & full install is worth the frustration and the time.

phongn wrote:Arguably you won't see much of a difference.

Especially not on 512 MB of RAM, and especially not on a laptop. This is one of the cases where you're probably fine where you're at.