I've got Vegas 4 running under XP Pro at home and under XP Home at the office. (How backwards is that?) About the only difference i ever notice is that the left pane of the explorer window sometimes shows more options under Pro. But, these options make absolutely no difference as far as editing is concerned. In fact, they make so little difference at any time ever that i can't even think of what they are at the moment. I didn't even have to do anything different for networking between the two. I just plugged in the ethernet cable and they were both connected.

Basically Home can be tweaked to show/allow you just about anything that Pro can do; it just has the extra stuff hidden by default.

Not quite true but unless your looking to hook up to a large LAN with mulitple domains I don't think Pro gives you anyhting more.

I believe Pro will recognize 2 processors and Home will not.

rique - XP Home will not recognise Dual Processors on the same machine? Are you saying Pro is for Duallies and Home isn't? - I really need to know this, PDQ! Kellsie, any comments? PAW any comments?

. . . getting confused by the day . . .

Grazie

The OS's are exactly the same, except for networking, remote desktop, and other non-home-like extras.

Thank you.

XP Home I believe from researching it, recognises the 2nd incarnation of execution engine you get on the hyperthreading versions of Intel P4 CPUs.
XP Home won't recognise more than the 1st phys/socketed CPU.

Only XP Pro and will recognise the 2nd physical CPU and any hyperthreading incarnations.


~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Idle banter:

Windows 2000 Advanced Server and Datacenter and the equivalent in .NET are needed to do beyond 2 CPUs with Microsoft providing the host OS serving your overrall desktop.

More than one physical processor is overkill for Vegas alone in its Vegas4 guise especially. Hyperthreading should be worthwhile though.

Despite this, if you multitask at all, Xeon and seemingly Opteron 2-way upwards systems are almost in the hands of mere mortals ;). Once you've had a duallie, you won't want to go back.

The best speed and size of RAM and CPU is the main factor and then how ancient the bus architecture is counts. E7505 Xeon's are a keen investment. SuperMicro X5DAL-TG2 or I-Will DP400 built into systems come out at about half the cost of the fastest PIII dual CPU 64bit-PCI systems.

I'd be happy to have a ~3GHz Xeon and E7505 motherboard but stick to just putting a single CPU in it. It is essentially a P4 then, but the price of two 3GHz CPUs is too high for mortals. 2x 2.4GHz is about the sweet spot, maybe 2.8GHz if you have a good credit limit!

To be clear here...

XP Home DOES support Hyperthreading.
It DOES not support actual physical dual processors.

"It DOES not support actual physical dual processors. " . . nearly there TJ - What then is NON actual physical dual processor? Is there a virtual version of a DUAL processor? Honest, is there such a thing? . . I would not be surprised if there was.

Regards,

Grazie

XP Pro also has on the fly file encription built in. Nice if you share your PC with multiple users or if you want a extra level of security.

Hyperthreading enabled CPUs have two virtual processors.
There is this thing called the parallel execution engine on a CPU.

This engine in a P4 has some latency to fill the execution circuits with instructions and data the delay is less on the Athlon range but that is another story more relevant to realtime operating systems which Windows/OSX/Linux in fact aren't.

Think of the PIV like a V8. Hyperthreading makes this a V4x2, and it is upto the OS and application software to make this work efficiently, more efficiently than the V8 original was. Separate torque characteristics but the same rpm because it has been split off. The disadvantages of hyperthreading are akin to driving a vehicles left hand track on a tank with one of the V4 and the right hand track with the other. Alright if you like to snake down the road!


Hyperthreading aware BIOS usually declare the single CPUs as being 2 CPUs when the power on screen comes up. On a dual CPU system you get 4 CPUs declared on the power on screen and 4 panels in the task manager/performance tab for each instance of CPU usage.

Hyperthreading typically is a plus if you have poorly written software or are running two or more major independent programs concurrently. Dual Xeon can't deliver 200% performance over the same speed P4 as the memory and chipset access bus is shared. AMD have at least made the chipset access independent on the multiprocessor Opteron (and AthlonMP) solutions.

I wouldn't call the split CPU a virtual processor myself. That suggests that you could split the processors again, or scale multiple processors into a giant single CPU. Not with Windows and similar architectures.

Hyperthreading was supposed to make the idea of understanding this better. Unfortunately folk think it is like a some kind of turbo charge thing. Intel marketing would like you to think that. It has practical uses and in the general case - you wouldn't turn the feature off. (not sure about the Vegas benchmarks achieved for hyperthreading with all other things equal, but Sony do say that Vegas was written with hyperthreading in mind).

I think the word "virtual" is overused. We'll be calling the telephone a "virtual gatway to a virtual private intercom" the way things are going.

Grazie, tell us what you are doing which makes you contemplate XP Home and hyperthreading, or XP Pro and Xeon/AthlonMP/PIII/Abit-BP6-dual-celeron1/Opteron? Are you getting into 3D animation?

RB - Good questions . .

. . just sitting down to Sunday Roast . . so I'll be some time replying - yeah? - But yes, you want to be sure I'm not going "over-the-top" with spec I might not use. Suffice it to say, I want to be able to do Render, Edit, Preview to external monitor in a better way than at present and maybe use some of my other packages - oh yes, get on the Web and speak for y'all!

Enough to go on RB?

Grazie