What is the difference between .........

Jzpop

Media Center is a customised version of XP, sold by Microsoft as a preinstalled version on hardware that is deemed to be compliant to their standards - in other words, it is very picky about what hardware it runs on.

The idea is that XP can be the glue that allows the user to have a home entertainment centre in their living room, and access their music, video etc via their TV.

See http://www.xpmediacentre.com.au/community/media-center-articles-guides/720-what-can-you-do-media-center-pc-part-1-a.html and http://www.xpmediacentre.com.au/community/media-center-articles-guides/719-what-can-you-do-media-center-pc-part-2-a.html for more info.

If you are not bothered about using it for those purposes, you might as well get a standard version of XP. Note that you can 'turn off' the Media Center interface that was designed to be viewed on your TV, and revert back to the good old XP interface that was always there but hidden under a new skin, if you don't want / need the Media Center features.

melbury

BexTech wrote: »

XP Media Center just adds a pretty program onto XP Professional that combines a few programs together such as TV tuner (though you will need a TV card / stick for it to work or stream some content over broadband) and DVD / CD burning and DVD-Video creating.

So is it added onto XP Professional rather than XP Home version? Presumably the Professional version is better, so bascially you would be getting that with the other bits.

BexTech

melbury wrote: »

So is it added onto XP Professional rather than XP Home version? Presumably the Professional version is better, so bascially you would be getting that with the other bits.

Yes, added to XP professional with the ability to join an Active Directory domain disabled.