Windows Media Center vs. XP Pro

I am building a laptop with Dell and ordered it with media center and I’m wondering if XP pro would be better? Any thoughts?

media center is just XP pro with the media center addons (obviously media center, wierd dancing people on the desktop, media center theme for windows, ect). If there isnt any difference in price, I’d go with media center (especially if you use a TV tuner or if you’re big into movies/music)… otherwise, there isnt any real difference

pro is more for businesses and schools. i also hear pro is better on security and networking

Pro is more for anyone who has a clue about computing. If you like sharing printers/drives over networks use pro, home is garbage for old people.

Never used media center so i say nothing for nor against.

Reading > you. No where was home edition mentioned.

I’ve got XP Pro on my desktop (@home and work) and Media Center on my laptop and haven’t seen any real advantage to Pro in terms of stability. Media Center is pretty slick when it comes to DVD’s and such and is the same OS as XP Pro, so I’d say you’re better off with Media Center.

Plus, the Media Center “Energy Blue” theme looks real nice. I found a way to get it working in XP Pro though.

media center is the xp pro with a dress.

Usually comes on lappys or desktops with tv tuner cards and other foo foo bullshit.

We get a ton of hp media center laptops, they are pretty nice, they have a tv tuner right on the side of the laptop, and a remote control.

Why you would want this on a laptop with a 15’’ screen i’ll never know…

Media Edition is best enjoyed with a TV Vid card. It has built in TiVO like features and works with a IR remote if it is compatible with XP Media ed.

i like my media center i am constantly watching dvd’s on the computer not so much tv though cause it looks like shit

Try joining Media center to a domain…if you don’t during the initial install lol

yeah, I only really use media center for the TiVO and Guide function

although, if I had a nice HDTV, I think I’d try and use it to it’s full capacity. Seems like it would be nice, especially for party’s and such for music (I really like how you can organize music thru it)

see i’m the exact opposite… i don’t like how its organized… and i HATE when windows has any control over ANY of my media files…

I know what you mean. I guess I just mean in the aspect of having 20-30 people going thru your computer and putting on music in a party type of enviroment. It’s nice how you can search by artist or album and see meta data associated with them (thats only if the tags are the same though lol… I’ve been working on organizing all of my music/editing the tags for the past month and I’m NOWHERE close to being done :P)… plus it allows said users to only access music… kind of like those digital jukeboxes in bars and such

word, good point, I’m the only one that uses my computer so I prefer foobar2000 to focus on the sound quality…

side track, I FUCKING HATE miss matching tags, and i’m too lazy to retag them. lots of times i’ll just delete the cd and find a scene release and grab all the cd’s by a particular artist to all the tags are the same.

you can do it, it’s a huge pain in tha ass and involves lots of regediting

I know its teh suck…