I am looking to buy either Home or Professional, but I had a question. If I have a dual-core processor do I need Professional or can either system be used?Thanks in advance for the help,Ryan

both XP Home and XP Professional will run fine on dual cores, in fact I have run both Windows XP home and Windows XP Professional x64 on the the "old" AMD Athlon 64 754 socket singlecore and the AMD 939 Socket Dualcore and they both run without a hitch. Bye the way if you are considering Windows XP Professional take a look at the 64 bit version.Best and Warm RegardsAdrian Wainer

Thank you very much. Now another of the same tpe question. Would Vista Business Edition be even better? Which would have the most benefits for a system to meant to run just FS and maybe one or two small apps.

Most benchmarks are showing that between (any version) of XP, and (any version) of Vista, there is a slight performance hit that most games will feel. If you are looking for *pure performance* right now, I would recommend the Windows XP route. Personally, I feel that Vista provides a stutter free flight experience (especially with FS2004), even though the FPS may be a few percentage points lower - so there are also some benefits in the Vista route. Likewise, if you are flying FSX and are building a computer which is capable of DX10 down the road (with a supernice video card), you may wish to opt for Vista now rather than later. (You would need Vista in order to use DX10, but you could always upgrade to Vista when needed)Another consideration is cost - if you can get XP cheaper than Vista, you may wish to take that direction. :) For your needs (simple desktop apps + MSFS) I think XP will suit you fine.

The only thing that Vista gets you is a Directx 10, capability if you do not want that or are happy to add Vista as a second operating system at a later date, defenitely XP is for you, the Windows XP Professional x64 should be capable of running the to come 64 bit programmes and may well score over the 32 bit version of Vista in that respect. Whilst Vista "business" would sound on the face of it a "a no non-sense" does the job solution, the issue is that Vista is a very new operating system and will probably need a service pack one before it can be taken as fully reliable, whereas Windows XP x64 is built on the basis of tried heavy duty and high reliability server operating system combined with the front-end ease of use of Windows XP, the only fly in the ointment with Windows XP x64 is if you are thinking of that operating system, is that you must make sure that any hardware you intend to use with it, has Windows XP x64 drivers and do not expect regular 32 bit anti-virus and partioning software to run on it, they will not but specific versions are available for this 64 bit software. Best and Warm RegardsAdrian Wainer

Thanks very much for your help guys.

I think noone answered the question Home vs. Professional, so I would recommend the Home version. XP Professional really doesn't offer anything over the Pro version, if you do not connect to a domain and if you can live without some of the extra features of Pro, like Search or Recent Documents, which you can get with other tools like "Google Desktop" anyway.I ran XP Home for quite some time on one machine and didn't really use any of the Pro features at all.Pat

XP Home..or if you want the added features of Pro, get XP Media Center Edition 2005. Only a little more, but it basically is XP Pro with some nice add-on's.If you go with Vista, get Vista Home Premium.