[BC] O/S Question

[Sid Schweiger]

>>I need a comparison of the following:
Windows XP Home vs. Windows Pro
What must be done to replace Home with Pro?<<

Lately, the only way to "upgrade" a Microsoft OS that really works properly is to back up your files, and then do a fresh install of the new OS, deleting all existing partitions.  I have heard of a few successful "in-place" upgrades from XP Home to XP Pro, but it's not something I'd care to do myself, because if it doesn't work for some reason you end up just fighting all the problems when a fresh install would have avoided them in the first place.

The main difference between XP Home and XP Pro is that Pro is more geared toward an office/networked environment.  Operationally, the only difference that I (as a sysadmin) ever really noticed was that in XP Home, you can't log in as Administrator unless you boot into safe mode (although I understand there's a registry hack that addresses that issue), which can be a PIA when troubleshooting.  I will also say that Vista Business handles networking far better than XP does, automatically detecting different networks and giving you easy-to-understand choices as to how you want the computer to operate for each different network.  However, if you have even a rudimentary understanding of computer networks, either flavor of XP is easy enough to configure manually.  I have yet to find any software that will run on XP Pro that won't also run on XP Home.
 
>>Please compare Office 2003 with Office 2007
Any advantages to upgrade?<<

The main difference here is that Office 2007 files are saved (in their native file format) as .XML files (.DOCX, .XLSX, .PPTX and .MDBX), which take up substantially less disk space than their older format counterparts (.DOC, .XLS, .PPT and .MDB; file-format converters are available).  Functionality is somewhat improved (there are some things you can do with web-compatible formats like XML that you can't do otherwise), but IMO not enough to make a huge difference for normal every-day use.  (Office 2007 can read and write files in the older file formats too, and if you decide to do that it will warn you when some 2007-style functionality will be lost by saving in the older format.)  Our office transferred a year ago from a mixture of Office 97/2000/XP/2003 to 2007, and the learning curve for most of our users was pretty short.

Sid Schweiger
IT Manager, Entercom New England
20 Guest St / 3d Floor
Brighton MA  02135-2040