If you've got a choice, choose professional over home edition.......

I've had windows xp on several machines, home edition that is. Had lots of mysterious little problems with home edition because I change hardware fairly often. The last time I rebuilt my main machine I decided to spring for a copy of professional. Microsoft would have you believe that home edition and professional edition are identical except for a few included software packages, this just isn't so. Most message boards will reveal that the networking and other intimate details of the operating system are MUCH improved in professional over home edition the differences are more indepth that Microsoft would have you believe.

From my own experiences I can tell you that I've had my current copy of professional running on my desktop for over three years (through several hard drive upgrades--I ghosted the OS to the new drive using Norton Ghost) with very few problems, as compared to an almost yearly full reload of home edition.

Why is XP better or worse than 98?
Most avid gamers still prefer windows 98, mostly because if you ever go to a LAN party and try to play multiplayer games you won't be able to join any games running on a 98 machine if you are running XP--the network security in XP makes the two systems fairly incompatible when networking multiple machines (it's possible to get them talking at least somewhat....but it's not a thing for a novice to try to tackle). Gamers are also generally from the poorer crowd still dealing with frankenhardware (multitudes of miscellaneous old hardware bits and pieces not sold as a system) on older motherboards that might not be able to handle XP. At first many games simply wouldn't run on the NTFS file system used by XP, those problems have mostly been fixed with updates from the game writers. If you've got a really old game that is no longer supported with updates you might still run into a few problems getting it to run. I've found the compatibility mode in XP is pretty good, I've seen some pretty old windows 95 stuff run just fine under xp with a bit of setting tweaking.

Windows 98 was pretty good for its time but it had one huge achilles heal, it was still running over DOS with all its limitations. Putting more than 512 meg of ram on windows 98 is a big problem because it runs out of DOS resources. Windows 98 also used FAT32 for its file system and has disk partition size limitations because of that fact. Windows XP no longer has the DOS achilles heal and thus is much better at memory management, XP also is not limited to FAT 32, it can read and write to those partitions with the same size limitation but it also supports NTFS (NT file system) that allows much larger petitions than you could ever have with FAT32, it also stores data a bit more efficiently.

What you get:
Since this is an oem disk you buy it with a piece of qualifying hardware such as a motherboard. Oem software generally comes with a very sparse install manual, the cd, and the license sticker on the outside of the package.

Installation:
I never believe in upgrade or even repair installations if I have the time to do a fresh install in a new directory--this just plain saves you a ton of headaches. The installation CD is bootable so if you don't have an ancient system that doesn't handle boot from the cd (and if you do you probably shouldn't even try to run XP on that system) all you do is place the xp cd in the drive tray, set your bios to boot from the cdrom and restart your system.

From years of tech experience I believe it's better to load an operating system with the most minimal of hardware installed on the computer (i.e. hard drive, video card and nothing else), this keeps possible hardware conflicts or driver issues from messing up your installation, however windows xp is a bit different because big brother M$ feels they have a right to stick their big nose in your computer and record what hardware you have for that particular copy of their operating system (on the theory that they're going to stop people from installing the same os on multiple machines that way). I totally disagree with MS tactic here, it's a big fat inconvenience for anyone that upgrades a lot or uses their computer as a test bed for testing other devices--I feel that what I put in my system is none of MS business. If I was a hacker that wanted to steal an OS, I'd steal a corporate edition that doesn't have all this "anti-piracy" junk built into it--the corporations told them to shove it--consumers need to do the same if you ask me.

If you've got time for possible problems go ahead and leave all your devices installed for the os install, if not pull everything but what you absolutely need and install your other hardware one piece at a time later.

Activation:
XP requires an internet connection to tell big brother M$ what hardware is in your machine to be connected to that OS license number (it records the bios id of your motherboard and identifying numbers of every other piece of hardware in the system at the time of the first boot). If you don't have an internet connection you can do it by phone but you only have 15 days to activate before your new OS will stop working because you haven't activated it. Once activated, if you change the system too much you'll be asked to activate again, if you activate too many times you'll have to call M$ and beg their indulgence to install the OS you've bought and paid for while they politely accuse you of trying to install it on multiple systems.

updates:
After activation hit the windows updates button and let it download updates--no matter how fresh your disk is there are updates coming out almost every few days so there will be at least a few and you want to be sure you're protected from any new cracks in the armor that someone may have found to exploit.

Service pack 2?:
If you bought a new xp professional oem disk then it may already have service pack 2 incorporated into it. There should be a sentence on the package or on a sticker discussing service pack 2. Initially there were a lot of issues with service pack 2 but I think that most of them have been resolved. I only had one software package that was on the trouble list for service pack 2 so I just downloaded the update and saved it before I put the service pack2 on my system. I suggest you put service pack 2 on the system right after the first boot and before you load anything else onto your computer.

Basically XP service pack two completely rewrote several sections of the XP operating system in an effort to prevent viruses from slipping in before the antivirus software was running and also to allow the user more control of what has permission to run and what doesn't (more control against malware, etc.). I for one recommend you get the service pack two, just be sure you check the compatibility list to see if there's any updates you need for your software before you put it on, in some cases service pack 2 was preventing updates from downloading (as was happening with wordperfect office).

What additional software should I get to keep my OS healthy:
Firewall/antivirus: Windows xp has a basic firewall built in, but it doesn't offer antivirus for anything that may come in on an email. Norton is of course a very well known antivirus and firewall package, but because it is so well known and widely used there are several viruses out in the population that are written specifically to disable it and get around it. My ex has a supposedly up to date copy of Norton 2004 and I had to go over and pull his hard drive to remove two viruses that it was detecting but could not remove for some reason--my copy of norton removed them no problem but because they were on his operating system drive they were doing something that prevented Norton from removing them. It's sometimes good to have a second antivirus available to you on the machine (or at least one that can run from outside windows xp when the system boots up). The online free virus detection and removal utilities are often very good, but if the virus you have is eating so many of your cpu cycles that nothing can run then you need something else at the local level to fix the problem. Www.trendmicro.com/housecalls is a great online free utility and they also make PcCillan firewall/antivirus which I think works very will but has the annoying tendency to popup windows all the time when downloading definitions--makes it kinda hard to game when that dumb window is popping up and minimizing your game all the time.

Registry cleaning utilities: Norton system works 2003 and newer comes with a decent registry cleaner but I have found something much better, Registry Repair Pro by 3b software http://www.3bsoftware.com/tproduct/registryrepair/rr31.html I was having problems with my firewire ports on my system not working and the problem turned out to be a windows registry mess. This software found over 300 bad registry entries that Norton system works wasn't finding, after running this software my firewire ports are working properly again. If you just buy it from the web site the price is normally 20.00 but at the current time if you download the trial version first, it contains a link to where you can get it for only 9.99--I recommend this purchase highly. Windows XP has a more robust Registry system than 98 had but it's still possible for it to get junked up by old entries that software removals don't take out of there completely--you need something such as this software to clean it up occasionally.

Defrag utility: If you use your computer a lot and uninstall and install software a lot your hard drive is going to get fragmented. Fragmented drives are less efficient because the system has to hunt all over the drive to find all the pieces of your file and in time it can really slow everything down. Norton system works comes with speed disk that does a fair job but there are better packages. The defrag utility built into xp works ok but it's really slow. I have Executive Software's disk keeper, I think it works very well and offers additional function such as boot time defrags of the paging file, directory consolidation, etc. They sell the package in two flavors for the home user or the business user, if you have an old full version they offer upgrades very reasonably. I have version 8, the latest is version 9, I think my last upgrade from 7 to 8 cost me ten bucks as a download version.

Professional vs. Home edition:
Now that service pack two has come out, there may be a few less differences between the two OS but I can tell you from past experiences that Professional has always been a hundred times more stable and trouble free than home edition ever was, at least on the hardware that I have the OS installed on. I use removable drive bays in my main computer to allow me to easily swap hard drives around for testing purposes, etc. Home Edition on several occasions refused to completely install the hard drives in those removable bays leaving them running in a slower compatibility mode than they otherwise should be able to run at. I also had a problem with a very widely used and common AMD 761 chipset on another backup system. On my laptop I've also had recent problems with my wireless setup, it was working fine before but suddenly isn't connecting to my access point anymore and I can't get out on the internet at all. Because of the issues with Home Edition, the next computer show I go to I'm going to buy a copy of professional for my laptop. On my main desktop I swap hard drives a fair amount and install and remove quite a lof of software, other than the problem with the firewire ports not working (wasn't assigning a drive letter) I've not had any problems that couldn't be cured by completely removing the problem software and installing in a fresh directory. Home Edition was an almost yearly complete fresh install, haven't had near the problem with professional; I've had the same xp professional installation on my system for at least three years.

To close:
The difference in price between oem home edition and oem professional edition is something like $50.00, the extra money is well spent. You'll be much happier with the professional edition if you have anything other than a standalone machine that is never upgraded or networked.

Update: I wanted to clarify a little bit on the issue of FAT32 partitions. I had this argument with somebody and so I went and got the real story. Both XP Home and XP Professional can create FAT32 partitions of a limited size--something like 32 megabytes. Windows XP Professional can read or write to FAT32 partitions of any size if the hard drive was formatted with another OS such as windows 98, I'm led to believe Home edition cannot write to fat32 partitions larger than 32 meg. Microsoft has a knowledge base article on this on their website, NTFS is more efficient on large hard drives and supports larger partitions than FAT32 can, that's why they're trying so hard to get everyone away from FAT32, there are still some uses for FAT32, such as floppy disks and solid state memory cards (compact flash, SD, etc.).

More info that might affect your choice of os: I've noted on several occasions that malware seems to be able install itself more easily on my home edition laptop than it can on my professional edition desktop. Same internet connection running at the same time, same web site(s) the laptop gets infected but the desktop doesn't (running the same antispyware utilities as well). I've also got a friend that I built a system for that is constantly being infected by viruses that go right around his Norton firewall. I've had to pull his hard drive on several occasions and clean it off via my system because his machine wouldn't run because of whatever it was infected with. So not only is Home Edition inferior in several areas, the security doesn't seem as good either, one more point for professional in my book. A router with a good firewall will help home edition but why should you have to spend extra bucks and hassle to fix M$ product?

An XP quirk I just ran into: If you ever want to ghost your C: drive to a newer bigger drive don't make the mistake of booting into XP to format it and test it before the copy. I've ghosted my system several times, I guess I never tested the new drive in XP before or I would have run into this before now.

Apparently when XP formats a drive it reads the hexadecimal drive identification and assigns it a letter, if you move this drive later to a different spot on your controller (usually drive 0 or 1 on your first controller cable for the C: drive) XP will continue to see the drive by the letter it gave it before hand. Win XP apparently, unlike earlier versions (like 98) doesn't pay any attention to where the drives are on the cable, it assigns a drive letter to the drive ID and no matter where you might put that same drive on another cable or even another controller--that drive will have the same drive letter--however, normally you can reassign drive leters in computer administration (unless it's a OS drive or a drive with a swap file on it). When I setup and tested my new drive XP gave it G:, when I moved the drive to drive zero on the first cable XP continued to call it G: and thus xp just sat and stared at me stupidly at the welcome screen and would not boot.

M$ has apparently been aware of this one for awhile and has done nothing about an easy fix for it, even administrative rights and administrative tools in XP will not let you change the drive letter of a system drive or a drive that has a swap file on it. The only solution is a registry hack, Microsoft provides a knowledge base article on how to do this, it's not difficult but you must have administrator rights on your machine to accomplish it.

This same situation also apparently has a history of occuring if you load XP onto a system with an internal Zip drive (I would imagine an LS120 drive might do the same thing too), for whatever reason XP has a bad habit of assigning C: to the zip drive instead of to the first hard drive it finds in the system. Another good reason for making your system basic before installing an OS!

January 2009: Vista is out, personally I wouldn't have it, like so many MS products, it's an overthought resource hog.  Unlike XP, each copy of VISTA oem is tied to the first motherboard it's loaded onto; you can never legally put that copy of vista on another motherboard unless you can prove the first one died (so what, now we have to keep a small pile of dead motherboards lying around to make MS happy?  ...no I don't think so).  MS has also made the requirement that any computer capable of handling 2 meg of ram or more cannot be sold with XP...now come on, that's just ridiculous...I just bought a dell netbook that came with xp 32 bit home only because it officially only handles one meg ram (now there is a 2 meg chip that works in it but not officially). 

Windows 7 is due out soon, if it's built on Vista, again I'll be boycotting it.  I run xp 64 bit professional on most of my machines (it's getting tough to find but it is still available in a few places), vista did prompt more drivers and better support for that OS so that now I really don't have trouble finding drivers and software for most stuff.  XP is the best version of windows MS has put out in the recent past, until 64 bit software becomes more prevalent I don't think too many people will be making the switch from 32 bit xp.  I think the upgrade to 64 bit xp was worth it and if you can find some of the few packages written to take advantage of the larger data highway it's worth the upgrade..it's a shame MS abandoned probably one of the more stable OS they've released lately in favor of the VISTA fiasco.