Dec 10
2007The many Faces of Windows XP
Filed Under (Windows Xp) by Admin on 10-12-2007
Tagged Under : DirectX 9, DVD Player, Home, Itanium, Media Center Edition, Microsoft, os, Professional, Remote Desktop Connection, Tablet PC edition, windows, Windows Xp, Windows XP 64-bit Edition, Windows XP Embedded, Windows XP Starter Edition, xpe
It started out in only two editions—Windows XP Home Edition and Windows XP Professional, but over time, newer versions of Windows XP were released, each tweaked for a new purpose.
Windows XP Home and Professional
The Home Edition of Windows XP, as the name suggests, was built for home users and lacked some of the features that came with the Professional Edition. It could not be part of a network controlled by a central Windows Server—a scenario more common in professional organizations. It did include the new ‘Remote Desktop Connection’ feature, which let it connect to and control other XP machines, but did not support other machines connecting to it.
The Professional Edition came with support for file encryption, which increased data security; this was not present in the Home edition. Also, while XP Professional supported two processors running in parallel, XP Home only supported one.
Windows XP Starter Edition
Worried about the rampant piracy of its best OS, Microsoft introduced a low-cost version of Windows XP Home in countries such as Thailand, Malaysia, India, and some Latin American countries. It also promised localized support (support for languages other than English). But the Starter Edition had some bizarre limitations. It didn’t allow users to run more than three programs at the same time, and didn’t allow programs to open more than three windows at the same time. The screen resolution could not be set to anything higher than 1024 x 768, and it was licensed to work with older processors like the Intel Celeron and AMD Duron.
The Starter Edition found little acceptance in these markets, and they preferred the cracked versions of Windows XP Home and Professional.
Windows XP Media Center Edition
A year after the launch of Windows XP, Microsoft released the Windows XP Media Center Edition, which aimed to turn the home computer into a full entertainment solution. It’s basically Windows XP Professional, with the addition of new software— Media Center. Media Center turned your computer into a remote controlled TV, DVD Player and music system. It also lets you record video from the TV to your hard disk. Now, you can ‘pause’ live TV by recording it to your hard drive when you need to make that important trip to the kitchen but don’t want to miss any part of the news.
Media Center can only offer all these capabilities on a mean machine, and so Microsoft decided it wasn’t wise to sell it as a separate retail version, should someone try to run it on a lower-end PC. They only distribute it to computer builders, and to own Media Center you need to buy a PC that comes loaded with it. Media Center 2005, released in October 2004, requires at least a 1.6 GHz processor, DirectX 9-compatible video hardware such as ATi’s Radeon or nVidia’s GeForce, and 256 MB of RAM at a bare minimum.
Other Editions of Windows XP
With Intel releasing new 64-bit processors such as the Itanium, Microsoft decided to release a new edition of Windows XP, called Windows XP 64-bit Edition. It was designed to exploit the abilities of both Intel’s and AMD’s newest processors. It started out with little support for multimedia applications, but this was addressed in its later versions.
XP also came in Tablet PC edition, which was compatible with touch-screens and supported handwriting notes on-screen. For use in applications ATMs, industrial robots and TV set-top boxes, there was Windows XP Embedded, also called XPe. It’s the same OS, but re-engineered a little to run on low-end hardware like 200 MHz processors and 32 MB of system RAM. Tempting though it might be, the license for XPe doesn’t allow you to install it on a regular PC.