[X4U] Implications of Boot Camp

[Stroller]

On 7 Apr 2006, at 03:38, Jim Robertson wrote:

> On 4/6/06 7:14 AM, "Stroller" <macmonster at myrealbox.com> wrote:
>
>> there's no clear indication in your post
>> that you need the Professional edition of XP over the Home edition.
>
> I know virtually nothing about the various flavors of XP. I bought  
> XP Pro
> for two computers in our office because I read something that said  
> that if
> there were more than five nodes on a network XP Pro was the better  
> choice.

Mr Ameeti has answered this admirably.

> If I have a laptop (MacBook Pro) that joins a network occasionally,  
> but the
> network has 8-20 machines on it, and I configure the Windows  
> partition to be
> a DHCP client of our DSL router, can it be running XP Home edition?

Windows XP will use DHCP to obtain an IP address by default. If you  
go into Control Panel > Network Connections and right-click on the  
LAN network connection, choose properties, highlight TCP/IP and click  
the Properties button you'll normally see it's set to "obtain IP  
address automatically".

As Mr Ameeti says, XP Pro is _only_ relevant if you're accessing a  
Windows network with a Domain Controller. It would be debatable  
whether a DC was required for a network of 8 - 20 machines but if you  
can connect to the network with your Mac & get internet access then  
you'll be able to do so using XP Home - the only functions that are  
affected in Home are related to authentication for file-shares on the  
LAN, roaming profiles and other "corporate" features.

> Is XP Pro better configured to avoid infections?
> ...Hearing these stories, I'm amazed that people just roll over and  
> accept it.

XP's security out-of-the-box is clearly unacceptable, but all the  
stories you're hearing surely relate to machines which are installed  
without adequate ant-virus. If you install decent anti-virus and  
resist downloads from the most obvious porn sites you'll be ok.

Anti-spyware programs like Ad-Aware are remarkably paranoid and will  
include even cookies in their reports; if I go to http:// 
www.nytimes.com/ I see adverts for an airline and for HP laptops -  
these ads surely have associated "tracking" cookies to enable the  
advertising aggregators to link viewers of the NY Times with any  
other site on which you might see advertising from the same  
advertising agency. Since these cookies provide no personally- 
identifiable information most of us don't consider them privacy- 
infringing and we surely have many of them stored in Safari's cache  
of which we are unaware.

Stroller.