Windows XP Professional: The Missing Manual

Professional Edition vs. Home Edition

It’s mostly true that there’s really just one Windows XP. The Professional and Home editions look alike, generally work alike, and are based on the same multigigabyte glob of software code.

But as with a pizza, insurance policy, or Toyota Camry, you can pay a little more to get a few extras tacked on. Buying the Professional Edition equips you with these goodies. Many of them are interesting primarily only to professional corporate network nerds, to be sure, but all are described in this book:

• Remote Desktop. If your XP Pro machine has a permanent Internet connection (like a cable modem or DSL), you can connect to it from any other Windows machine via the Internet (or office network). You can see what’s on its screen and manipulate what you find there—a great feature when you’re traveling with a laptop.

• Corporate domain membership. XP Pro computers can be part of a domain—a group of networked computers, usually in big corporations (Chapter 19), that system administrators can maintain as a unit. Computers running the Home Edition can’t join a domain and aren’t affected by the changes the administrator makes to the domain settings.

• Administrative shares. Windows XP Pro creates several shared folders for use by administrators and operating system services that manage the computer environment on the network. For security reasons, and to limit problems like somebody deleting essential files, XP Pro doesn’t give everyday employees access to these ...