Windows XP Home Edition vs Professional
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.
Contents
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.
Windows XP Home Limitations in 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.
Some advanced network components designed for corporate networks-the user interface for the IPSec manual configuration are not enabled in Windows XP Home Edition.
Hack to Change Windows XP Home to Windows XP Pro
Convert and turn Windows XP Home Edition to Windows XP Pro Edition, from within the operating system without re-installation. This is a partial conversion due to limitations in the scope of the process.
- This will 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. The hack doesn’t actually install and add in all the features from Windows XP Professional that Windows XP Home has disabled. It will not provide Remote Desktop Server or Group Policy Editor, since those are features that are actually absent from XP Home rather than just being disabled.
In Windows XP Home edition many advanced features are simply disabled. Of those not altered from within the code, many can be switched back on via the Windows registry.
- Open Registry Editor (regedit).
- Navigate to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE/SYSTEM/ControlSet00X/Control/ProductOptions, where ControlSet00X is the one with the highest number.
- Delete the ProductSuite registry key.
- Then, create a new DWORD value and named it as Brand.
- Set the “Brand” value data as 0.
- Reboot the system.
- On boot up after the BIOS screen, press F8 to display Windows XP Startup Menu.
- Choose Last Known Good Configuration (LNG) and hit Enter.
Windows XP will start up as usual. After logging into the desktop, check the system properties to verify that it’s now Windows XP Professional.
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.
Joining an NT Domain with a Converted Windows
According to the source, this hack WILL NOT allow the converted Windows to join an NT domain. According to user reports, after running Windows Update on a converted machine, it WAS able to join an NT domain. This may depend on the service pack level and what updates follow the conversion.
