XP Home vs. XP Pro: Which to get?

[wolfie]

I'm currently looking at getting a new laptop (old one is dying), and I WON'T touch Vista with a 10 foot pole (or a 12 foot Romanian giant either - cookies for the reference). My desktop will be running XP Home after a hardware upgrade, and I'd like to keep things compatible (I have a couple "virgin" XP Home OEM packages) - at some point, I'd like to do a simple network between my machines.

The laptop model I'm interested is preloaded with XP Pro. Would I gain anything by replacing this with XP Home, and if so, are the drivers compatible? XP Home drivers are available from the manufacturer's site (laptop also available with XP Home, but it's a discontinued model and the hardware configuration I want is packaged with XP Pro), but it would be more convenient to get the drivers off the supplied discs rather than doing a fresh download.

[Mr. Rude]

You may as well just keep Pro loaded on that puppy.....You'd lose the networking capability that's built into Pro. ;)

Even if you never use it.

[technical.angel]

Yeah, stay with Pro. There shouldn't be any differences with drivers between the two, and Pro does have quite a few more goodies that might come in handy at some point.

[Greenday]

Heck, I have the capability to choose XP Pro or XP Home whenever I start up my laptop. I always choose Pro. Not sure why though.

[JustADude]

Pro does everything Home does, and then some. As others have mentioned, it's got much better networking and security capabilities that might come in handy later.

[Shabo]

Yep, it's true. And don't forget to set up an Admin password when it prompts you as you're setting up the machine!

[Zeeko]

Oh on the topic of setting up a admin password - make it TRICKY to figure out! And don't call it admin, call it something stupid or a random persons name. Then create another user for yourself that doesnt have admin rights. Never can be too careful! (heck I turn off all my drives except OS drive when online - paranoia!)