James first started this website when learning Visual Basic back in 1999 whilst studying his GCSEs. The site grew steadily over the years while being run as a hobby - to a regular monthly audience of over half a million unique developers. In July '08 James left his job as Head of Development at a digital agency in London to focus his energies on developerFusion full-time.
As always, the downside to all this is increased hardware requirements, and the cost of upgrading. Any PC bought within the last 2 years should run Windows XP perfectly fine; the recommended minimum spec is 128MB RAM, 300Mhz processor and a hefty 1.5GB of hard disk space. Although Windows XP can run on 64MB RAM, some features will be automatically disabled, and with the current prices of £20 for 128MB RAM, a bit of extra RAM will never go amiss.
Currently there are two editions of Windows XP, Home and Professional edition. Upgrade paths are defined by these terms; with users of Windows 2000 or NT 4 unable to upgrade to the home edition. (Of course, you can always run a new installation and install whichever release you desire). Use the following table to establish possible upgrade paths.
| Previous Version |
Windows XP Home Edition |
Windows XP Professional |
| Windows 3.1 | NO | NO |
| Any Evaluation Version | NO | NO |
| Any Server Version | NO | NO |
| Windows 95 | NO | NO |
| Windows 98/Windows 98 SE | YES | YES |
| Windows Me | YES | YES |
| Windows NT® Workstation 3.51 | NO | NO |
| Windows NT Workstation 4.0 | NO | YES |
| Windows 2000 Professional | NO | YES |
| Windows XP Home Edition | YES | |
| Windows XP Professional | NO |
The next subject to broach, therefore, is the differences between Home and Professional. Windows XP Professional includes support for the standard user accounts present in Windows 2000; whereas home edition assumes all users are either an Administrator or a Guest. Only Windows XP Professional supports Remote Desktop, up to two processors (compared to one for Home edition), EFS (Encrypting FIle System) and file-level access control. Additionally, Home edition is unable to login to an Active Directory domain, and Professional edition includes IIS (limited to a single site, as was the case with Windows 2000 Professional, and NT Workstation).
Comments