I'm going to buy a basic Dell trading machine that'll have 2 monitiors nad I'll be using ninja trader to trade. What is the advantage for me (if any) to upgrade to XP Pro versus just using regular XP home?
Oh, and I have no problem working with XP home or adding more memory DIMMS or PCI cards to my desptop, but beyond basic stuff like that, I'm not very tech savy at all.
Most important reason to choose Pro.. support for XP Pro will extend for 5 years beyond when support for XP Home has ended..
Looking at the comparison there doesn't seem to be any reason (beyond ms's "support" for pro) to upgrade. If you consider that you can get a free copy of XP Pro (tiny or educational) from torrents in a couple of years if you really feel you need the "extra support" from ms then there seems to be no reason. gnome, what does 5 years more support for pro actually mean for most users?
Those with XP Pro could buy a new machine today and use it until at least 2015 and will never "need" to "upgrade(?)" to Vista. All of my machines had XP Home on them, and I upgraded them to Pro a couple of years ago. Support for XP Home is currently scheduled to end in June 2010. It could be OK to have Home as one may not want to have the same computer past 2010, or MSFT might extend the life of XP with all the Vista problems.
Right... there just won't be further bug fixes nor security updates once "Extended Support" has ended.