Start a Conversation

Unsolved

This post is more than 5 years old

D

7761

March 19th, 2006 23:00

Dell 1505 and windows XP mce or XP pro?

Hi

I am a student and just went through for Dell's 1505 specs . 
I am really planning to buy it. But I am not sure about selecting the operating system of it. As dell is offering windows xp media centre edition (mce) free and charging $149 for the xp pro.
Can you please tell me whether the XP mce will be the right OS if want to run some other computaionally intensive software like Matlab, Maxwell etc?
would like to add, that I may sometime need a bit of  and I am not much in to TV watching!!

Your advice will be a great help for me to select.

thanks in advnce.

cheers
Dwaris

2 Intern

 • 

5.8K Posts

March 19th, 2006 23:00

XP MCE is basically a superset of XP Pro. Anything XP Pro does can be done in MCE, except join a domain. You are unlikely to need this at your school, but you should probably ask them to make sure.

You can compare the various versions of XP here: http://www.microsoft.com/windowsxp/evaluation/compare.mspx

2 Intern

 • 

5.8K Posts

March 22nd, 2006 00:00

Well now, dwaris has already said that MCE is being offered for free, and you can't get Pro or Home any cheaper than that. And any bugs in MCE I've seen reported do not interfere with the functioning of the non-MCE part of the operating system. So if he gets MCE, and chooses not to use the MCE programs, he gets a perfectly functioning XP Pro for free. It's a bargain.

And if the MCE works well, as it does for me- it's a no-brainer!

233 Posts

March 22nd, 2006 00:00

What major are you planning on taking up? If it's something like mechanical engineering, and requires a lot of 3D cad, get a good video card. Even matlab and mathematica with 3d graphing requires a good card.

233 Posts

March 22nd, 2006 00:00

Neither XP pro, nor home, nor mce will run your software any faster than one another. One thing to keep in mind is that mce has a lot of additional software, some of which is really buggy. I have an inspiron 6000, a very similar notebook to the e1505. If dell doesn't produce a better driver for the ati video card, you will get blue screens like crazy when your run the media center program. I am so frustrated that I want to install home edition or pro. I would say get home edition if you can because it is the cheapest, and pro won't offer any new features except networking. If you need pro, you can probably get it for a lot cheaper or even free from you university (average university price is $60 or free).

For people who don't get all the bugs I do, mce is great, and even greater with a tv tuner.
No Events found!

Top