XP Home/Pro + Multiprocessors

Post Reply New Topic

I recently purchased a new computer with Intel Core 2 Duo processors and XP Home Edition. Now I've just learned that whereas XP Home only supports up to one processor, XP Professional supports up to two. Does anyone know what performance gains I can expect from upgrading to Professional?

install linux. It will work with 2 processors.

I'd rather stick with Windows XP.

Also, does anyone know whether it would be OK switching straight from Home to Pro without a reformat? I imagine since they are mostly the same OS it shouldn't cause any issues... right?

You could switch from home to pro but it would be better to reinstall.

You mean reinstall over a formatted drive?

My computer came with XP Home Edition and I simply upgraded to XP Pro. No reformat. I needed it for Office 2003 so I could bingbang around with Excel. It works fine.

Be sure to enable automatic updates from Microsoft, run a registry cleaner weekly and defrag the hard drive every month or two. The PC mags have all kind of neat stuff for that. Have fun.

You don't need to upgrade actually. While multiple CPU's are not supported in Home Edition, Dual Core CPU's are. (As of SP2)

The only differences between XP Home and Pro are that XP Pro has 2nd Processor Support and the ability to join to a Domain. THAT IS IT!

A Dual Core Processor is a single processor so there is no worry there.

There is no reason to upgrade to Pro to use Excel in manner or fashion.


Save your money and stick with Home. It runs the same and unless you need to connect to a company domain as a domain computer you'll never miss not having Pro.

Not true!
To name a few other that I personally use:
* Support for multiple displays
* Remote desktop
* NTFS encryption
* Advanced file permissions. (If for nothing else this is great for deleting some files that "get stuck" and give you permission denied when you try.)

Ok, thanks everyone. Yes I don't have multi-processors after all, just dual cores. Bless Wikipedia for explaining the differences in lay terms.

Just a note: Booting XP Home in Safe Mode also works for fixing that sort of thing.

How strange that I got comfortable with WIN98, and would still be using it if I had version SE? Admittedly, paying out big bucks for Partition Magic made a difference; XP is fine if you don't mind losing all your data every time XP crashes, but the way they present all PCs (at least here in Europe) with just the local language, and one partition, is despicable!