Home vs. Pro

Why do you want XP Mode?

It is not for gaming purposes since it does not support graphics acceleration. It is meant to run business software which normally will not run in Win 7.

There is little that pro or other versions will give you over home. Your not missing out on much of anything with home.

I just feel like Home would be toy-like and Pro would make me a pro.  

I'm not sure, someone said Pro has more .... well Xp-mode I guess .... but I've still got my Xp Sp3 machine so ....

Most home users will be happy with the home version.

You need pro to support >16gb.

Here is a comparison:

http://www.microsoft.com/windows/windows-7/compare/defa...

You can always do an in place upgrade to pro later once you have home installed(and you pay MS an upgrade fee)

Pro has almost nothing over pro. XP mode sure, but as mentioned it lacks GPU acceleration so no gaming on it. Pro allows you to join domain while home will not, but odds are you aren't running a domain server at your house. Pro will also allow you to backup to a network, but this feature also probably doesn't interest you much. According to MS's compare page, thats its between the two versions.

http://windows.microsoft.com/en-US/windows7/products/co...

The ONLY difference I know between home and pro is the max supported memory limit. For home its 16GBs, while pro and above all support 192GBs.

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa366778%28VS.8...

I'm not so worried about this. 16GBs is still a lot of ram and there is a good chance we will be a on a newer OS before you hit this limit. (You'd have to be running more then four 4GB sticks for this to be an issue. Are 8GB sticks even here yet?) Second, I remember the days when XP home couldn't run a dual core chip. MS said XP home could run one "CPU" while pro was needed for more. When Intel came out with Hyperthreading, they changed it so it became XP home could run one "socket". This is what allows us to use XP home but still use multicore CPUs. If the memory limits started to bother people, I easily see MS changing things.

Stick with home. Its not a toy, and odds are you'll be wanting win8 before that 16GB ram limit comes into play.

Well I need PRO because I plan on running 1000 gigs of RAM on my machine ....... just kidding  


No, you've both convinced me that I don't need Pro. I'm only gonna have 8 gigs of RAM and I've still got an Xp machine right now if I do happen to need it .... not that I will use it though after getting my new machine together.


Thanks again