XP Home to XP Pro

TimothyC · Post by **TimothyC** » 2005-08-05 11:08am

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.

Post by **Mr Bean** » 2005-08-05 11:20am

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

phongn · Post by **phongn** » 2005-08-05 11:29am

Arguably you won't see much of a difference.

TimothyC · Post by **TimothyC** » 2005-08-05 11:30am

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.

GrandMasterTerwynn · Post by **GrandMasterTerwynn** » 2005-08-05 01:47pm

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.