That has changed. Microsoft has stated that Home will have the same support as Pro. Therefore, it's now not generally beneficial to upgrade from Home to Pro.
The purchase is water under the bridge gnome; he already bought it. What inputs he is going to have on those monitors and what outputs he will have on the cards is only known by Dell. As for how many monitors per head is another Dell question. We still don't know if he is getting "Dual cards" or a "dual card".
Everything will be fine once you wipe the VISTA and load XP Pro. Vista not easy to wipe. My techy had to go to dos to reformat drive on a laptop i bought with vista, mistakingly thinking it would be easy to get rid of that monstrosity known as vista. It wasn't! took my techy all night. Msft is not being a good Christian!
Whatever it is, it can be worked out. I set up a 6-monitor rig this weekend for a fellow on a T3400... it was a snap. I didn't read through the entire thread.. we stil talking about the OPs list of parts? There was a dualhead card mentioned.. 8800GT. Funny, no mention of the comptuer model and hence the mobo... the most important part.
it's a XPS 630. agree - Dell never tells anyone about the mobo; they keep people in the dark so they can charge more! Just like they don't tell you the fsb and like they take a nice cpu like that QX6850 and only use DDR2. Like running a Ferrari on solar if you ask me. He was asking in here for confirmation about the 3 monitors working with what he bought so I just asked him to call Dell and ask them to make sure it's all going to go together without him having to order more parts and waiting to use his brand new machine like what happened to me when I was dumb enough to buy a Gateway in 1998 (my first home pc).
That's not entirely correct. On their Tech Specs page for each model, they say what kind of chipset... that's the important thing (as probably all of their mobos are OEM from Foxconn). But unfortunately, Dell reps are not the people to ask about a rig to run "more than 2 monitors"... they've shown over and again that they are not schooled on the topic.