XP Pro vs. XP Media Center

I'm working on picking out a laptop and some of the ones I'm looking at have Pro and some have Media Center (I'm not going to use vista, at least not anytime soon). What exactly is the difference between them? Right now I'm leaning towards Pro just because I have no idea what Media Center is. All help is appreciated, thanks!

 

Media Center is basically XP Home on steroids. It has alot of added "cool" features that pertain to media heavy users. Pitted against pro, pro wins my vote for the added business and connectivity features, but I personally have no need for pro, so media center and its "cool" features are fun for me.

 

Honestly, MCE is only useful if you have a TV Tuner. At least that is how I feel.

Bottom line: I'd just get what is cheaper unless Pro has some feature you just have to have.

 

The only difference between MCE and XP Pro is that MCE is XP Pro just without some of the advanced networking features with I doubt you would need anyways. Windows Media Center is Windows XP Professional minus the advanced networking with a Media Center program installed, thats it.

The Media Center program is basically an advanced version of Windows Media Player with more options, such as TV viewing and recording, Picture viewing, song sorting and many others.

It's worth it to go with Media Center Edition over XP Pro because of the price and the fact that anyone outside of a business enviorment probably wouldn't notice any difference between the two besides the lack or addition or the Media Center Program.

For more information here is a link to Microsoft's Media Center Edition 2005 Webpage:

http://www.microsoft.com/windowsxp/mediacenter/default.mspx

 

I know MCE is just a stripped down version of Pro, but when I changed from MCE to Pro, my computer felt a lot faster

 

MCE has built-in bloat from the media center functionality.

 

The bloat from MCE can be disabled if you force it to run the XP Home start-up sequence. That increases boot time and decreases cpu and mem overhead substantialy. Or you can just manually disable the bloatware.

 

MCE is XP Pro. You get virtually everything, including the IIS server if you want to install it. The only thing it lacks is the abiltiy to connect to a network domain (except one that you name when you install Windows). It's not a souped up version of XP Home. Media Center itself, comes with it, but you don't have to use it - you can completely ignore it. It's just a useless piece of bloatware anyway unless you insist on using your laptop as the control center for a home entertainment system, and even then, it can't do a thing that I couldn't do 10 years ago with the software that came with my TV tuner equipped video card.

 

How would you go about doing this?

 

My MCE version of Windows XP is a speed demon on a simple single core Turion 1.8 with 1 GIG of RAM. I don't know of any bloat that Media Center itself adds unless you actually click on it to run it. It's actually pretty nice to look at, and it runs fast on my machine. But as I said before, it doesn't do anything that I can't already do with other software that comes with XP (I don't have a TV tuner on my laptop anyway).

 

I tested both for a long time and didn't notice any difference on the performance. Benchmarks proved i was right.

 

First of all thanks a ton for all the info!

So it looks like the difference is that pro has some networking stuff that Corps would want/use for the most part, and media center has a windows media player on steroid and does stuff if I have a TV tuner.

I guess the question is, is media center anything special (other than the TV stuff)?

 

I think MCE's kernel is even bases on Pro's, so there is virtually no difference between them other than the ones already noted

 

MCE is cheaper and the Media Center program is quite intuitive IMO. If I were to buy/build a desktop today, it would certainly have MCE, because it would probably get a TV tuner card. But for a laptop, if you don't have a TV tuner and a big hard drive for media, it's not going to be anything special. The Royale theme is nice, but you can download it for XP Home and XP Pro anyway.

But at the same time, the only ability that you lose by not going with Pro is joining a network domain. If this isn't planned to be a business laptop, then I see no reason to spend the extra $$ for Pro. One thing that does come standard with XP Pro but not Home (not sure about MCE) is a system administrator password. On an XP Home Computer, you can simply boot the computer into safe mode and cause any havoc you like if the owner hasn't set an admin password, whereas an admin password is set in the installation of XP Pro. You can set this password later through XP Home, so even that's not a deal breaker. Just something to be aware of. But my suggestion? Go with MCE if this isn't a business laptop.