Home Edition or Professional? The essential differences are these:

Remote Desktop. You can’t use Remote Desktop to connect to a computer running Home Edition. (Btw, the computer you connect from can be running any version of Windows 9x/NT/2000/XP.) You can, however, use Remote Assistance to connect to a Home Edition computer.

Multiprocessor. You can’t use Home Edition on a multiprocessor system.

Network Domain. With Home Edition, your computer can’t join a Windows NT/2000 domain. (You can, however, use all domain resources if you have a domain user account.)

Network File Sharing. With Home Edition, you’re essentially stuck with Simple File Sharing. You can share/protect only at the folder level, and you can only make a folder private or share it with everyone. The Windows 2000 security model that’s available in Professional offers granular security control that lets you assign specific types of access to specific users for specific files. (Most home user won’t need this level of control.)

Future Upgrading. If you install Professional now, you won’t be able to upgrade to the Home Edition of the next version of Windows, so you’ll pay an extra $100 now and again the next time you upgrade Windows.

XP Pro includes everything that’s in Home. If you’re unsure about which to get (that is, the points above don’t seem to apply to you), try Home Edition. Worst case: you later decide to upgrade to Pro. The Home Edition- to-Professional upgrade is $125, so you’re only out an additional $25 compared to purchasing Pro initially.