I bought a used laptop from a reseller who repurposes machines from former corporate users. The machine came loaded with XP Pro. Is there an advantage / disadvantage to replacing this with XP Home? I’d like to wipe the drive clean and start from scratch.
I’ll be using it for the web, the e-mail, and the WKO+, I don’t think i’m ready for Vista.
There are various network things that Pro can do that Home can’t…I THINK logging into a domain being one.
If the system runs without any issues, I’d uninstall any applications you don’t want and call it good, myself.
has the reseller already done a wipe and OS re-install? In general there is some benefit to doing this if this system has see a lot of installs and uninstalls, as many uninstalls don’t completely remove all traces of the app they are uninstalling but the benefit to your doing it again after they have recently done it is minimal.
There is no benefit at all and some disadvantages to having XP Home instead of XP Pro, but both OSes are about to hit End of Life, so if you are going to wipe the disk and start from scratch, either stick with XP Pro or get a release candidate of Windows 7 and put that on there.
Chris
FWIW - the Netbooks crave is alive…and with good reason.
You can buy a very capable Netbook for $300 loaded with XP Pro, upgrade the RAM for $25 to 2GB and toss on Windows 7 beta if you desire.
Netbook market has exploded after they basically scrapped Linux and installed Windows.
If you can return it, you might want to look into this option.
Get an Acer aspire one , $240 - $299 8.9 screen , $399 for the 5 hour battery model . The 10" 2 g ram is 500 ish. I think All are XP home .