Difference between revisions of "Windows XP Home Edition vs Professional"

Revision as of 13:03, 25 March 2009

Windows XP Professional Edition has several features that are intentionally disabled in the Home Edition. Microsoft sells the Home Edition for a low price. Since Microsoft Windows contains a massive amount of uncharted code, including layers of legacy code going back to MS-DOS, it is easier for them to simply disable features in XP Home Edition rather than remove those features. Basically, Microsoft is greedy so they ask people to pay more in order to have all of the features enabled and available to the user.

Features only found in XP Pro

• Complete support for security between multiple users on the same machine.
• Complete peer-to-peer networking capability
• Ability to join NT domain or Active Directory
• Windows Administrative Tools (in the Start Menu and Control Panel)
• Automated System Recovery (ASR)
• Boot Configuration Manager
• DriverQuery
• Group Policy Refresh Utility
• Multi-lingual User Interface (MUI) add-on
• NTFS Encryption Utilitiy
• Offline Files and Folders
• OpenFiles
• Performance Log Manager
• Remote Desktop
• Scheduled Tasks Console
• Security Template Utility
• Taskkill
• Tasklist
• Telnet Administrator
• SMP Multi-processor support (2 or 4 CPUs)
• Dynamic Disks
• Fax.

Networking and Security

Computers running Windows XP Home Edition cannot join corporate domains. For this reason, features that require machine accounts within a domain, such as Group Policy, are not available in Windows XP Home Edition.

Features such as Encrypting File System (EFS) and computer domain account support add complexity that is primarily for business use and therefore is not supported in Windows XP Home Edition.

Domain-based credentials cannot be stored on a computer running Windows XP Home Edition. However, when connecting to a domain by using Remote Access or virtual private networking (VPN), the user’s remote access credentials are stored during that session to allow user access to domain resources.

Windows XP Home Edition uses a slightly different scheme than Windows XP Professional to identify security groups. Backup Operators, Power Users, and Replicator groups are removed from Windows XP Home Edition. Instead, Restricted Users are added as a group to Windows XP Home Edition, and the Administrators group is replaced by the Owners group.

The following security featurse are disabled in Windows XP Home Edition:

• Encrypting File System (EFS)
• Computer domain account support
• Access Control List (ACL) Editor
• Administrative shares (available only when joined to a domain)
• Log on using dial-up connection option in Log On to Windows dialog box
• Security-related Group Policy settings

Windows XP Professional allows up to 10 simultaneous file-sharing connections.
Windows XP Home Edition allows up to five connections only.

Hack to Change Windows XP Home to Pro

• This is untested. It may not provide all of the features available in XP Pro.

Enable the features found in Windows XP Professional on your Windows XP Home Edition installation with this hack. It will allow you to turn your Windows XP Home CD into a Windows XP Professional CD.

1. Copy the root directory and the i386 directory of the WindowsXP CD to your hard drive.

2. Extract the Bootsector of your Windows XP CD. You can use BBIE to do this.

3. Click START–>RUN–>REGEDIT

4. Highlight HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE

5. Click FILE–>LOAD HIVE and select the Setupreg.hiv file This file is located in the i386 folder. Use the one you extracted to your hard drive from your Windows XP CD.

6. Locate the following registry key:

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Homekey\ControlSet001\Services\setupdd

7. Edit the DEFAULT key and change the following values:

01 to 00
02 to 00

8. Change the name to the value HOMEKEY to anything.

9. Locate the following registry key:

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Homekey\ControlSet001\Services\setupdd

Edit the DEFAULT key and change the following values:

01 to 00
02 to 00

10. Highlight HOMEKEY and select FILE–>UNLOAD HIVE

You can now burn the data on your hard drive to a CD to make a new Windows XP CD. Then use the CD to install Windows XP. Be sure to make the CD bootable. You can use the instructions here to help you do that.