Ok, this may be kind of a dingy question, but I’ve tried to find a straight answer on the Microsoft website and haven’t yet. And I’m not going to pay them a fee to find out.
I am getting a laptop for Christmas. The one I want is on sale this week, and I intend to go get it…except for one problem. I have to have XP professional running to let me connect to the campus wireless network. This comes with XP Home. Is there going to be a way for me to upgrade/make the switch from Home to Professional once I get it or am I stuck with XP Home once I purchase? How much trouble is it to switch between the two?
Thanks.
The XP Professional upgrade package says that it will upgrade you from XP Home. This would be as easy as running the setup disk, and it would keep all of your settings, applications and configurations.
With that said, make sure you know exactly why you want to upgrade, there is little reason to do so. ** You certainly do not need XP Professional in order to surf the internet or access non-domain resources**. Even if you do access file servers you don’t need XP Pro because IIRC you can still do a domain authentication to a particular resource in XP Home - you can map a drive to the server you just can’t login to your workstation as a domain user.
The only other difference that I can think of offhand is that XP Home use dynamic disks - and this should never matter to you at home.
Thanks, Cooper.
I have been instructed by several people on campus that I will not be able to connect to the campus wireless network without running XP Professional - that’s the only reason I’d be making the switch.
And since most of my printing for classes is done through the wireless connection, as well as a lot of my classwork (for searches and the like), it’s pretty important that I have that access.
You didnt say what laptop you are getting, but a few of them let you specify what OS you want. As a matter of fact, I think that MS recently did a $75 rebate for anyone who updated from XP Home to Pro when they bought a new puter.