What's the difference between Windows Home and Pro Editions?
Hi, everyone, Leo Notenboom
here for Ask Leo.com. The differences have been getting a little bit
muddier over the years, perhaps even fewer differences.
But there are some very specific
differences between the Home and Pro editions.
Home, of course, comes preinstalled on many consumer
machines, and Pro actually comes preinstalled on many business machines.
What's the difference?
Well, let's take a quick look at what the highlights are.
The big difference that actually impacts
my ability to answer questions sometimes is the Group Policy Editor.
The Group Policy Editor allows you to make configuration changes to Windows.
Windows Pro has a Group Policy Editor.
Windows Home does not.
If there are changes to be made,
what that means is that in Home, you're often either not making those
changes or you have to dive into the Registry to make those changes
manually, which includes its own level of risk.
Group Policy Editor is a nice way of
mitigating that risk by not forcing you to go into the registry, but in fact,
exposing specific settings one way or another.
Another option is Remote Desktop.
Now, Remote Desktop Client is present in both Home and Pro.
What that means is that you can, from a Windows Ten Home machine,
use the Remote Desktop client to connect to another machine.
But that other machine can't be Windows Ten Home or Windows Eleven Home.
It needs to be a Pro Edition, or better. By better,
I mean an Enterprise Edition or one of the other editions that are available.
But the actual ability to connect to your
machine using a Remote desktop requires that you be running Windows Pro Edition.
Now, to be clear, this has nothing to do
with third party Remote Desktop applications.
Team Viewer, Remote PC, Chrome, Remote Desktop.
Those all work in all of the editions.
This is only about the Remote Desktop service in Windows itself.
It's only there in Pro, not in Home,
but the client that you can use to connect to a different machine is present in both.
Bitlocker gets really confusing.
It got much more confusing in recent
editions of Windows Home, and that's because hard disks are showing
up encrypted, and they're encrypted using BitLocker technology.
But the user interface,
the control you might want to have over BitLocker, is not present in Home.
Windows Pro Editions has the full interface for BitLocker,
allowing you to use BitLocker on folders or USB drives or your internal hard drive.
Windows Home has full disk encryption.
It turns out that's actually enabled by the BitLocker technology.
You just don't find BitLocker referenced
in any of the controls that you have available to you.
And finally, the one that I think probably makes the most difference to some folks is
what I'll call Windows Update for Business.
Windows Update is very controversial.
They've taken away a lot of control
that we were used to having in previous versions of Windows.
It's been this way
now for several years. With Windows Pro editions you have the ability to pause
Windows Update for a longer period of time than you do with Windows Home.
Windows Home I believe you cannot pause it for a few days but you're going to get
Windows Update running with Windows Pro Edition.
You can of course pause it for something like up to five weeks which could be
really important in a business environment or if you're giving presentations or
who knows what, you just know that Windows Update isn't going to happen for a while.
So that's one difference that I think also points a lot of people at getting the pro
edition of Windows if it's available to them.
Now. Of course there are a lot of other
differences, small differences under the hood, a lot of fancy names
for features that honestly you and I rarely if ever actually use.
However, in the companion article for this
video I do have the links to Microsoft's own comparison for both Windows Ten Home
and Pro editions and Windows Eleven Home and Pro editions.
That's AskLeo.com.39397.
The other difference very clearly is price
Windows Ten, Windows Eleven Pro comes at a premium.
It costs more than Windows Home.
Is it worth it?
It's hard for me to judge because it
really depends on your budget and your needs.
I consider it important enough.
I want Remote desktop, I want Group Policy editor.
I'm kind of on the fence about
Windows Update delays but the bottom line is those features you need to evaluate
whether or not those features really are important to you, how important they are
to you, whether or not you've got alternatives.
In some cases, for example,
there are alternatives to using BitLocker but the bottom line is that when in doubt,
if you've got the budget for it, I actually do recommend Windows Pro.
It's what I run myself and it's what makes
my job a little bit easier when you are running it as well.
Hopefully that helps. Like I said, the links for the comparisons
provided by Microsoft for any updates, for comments and more visit Askleo.com/39397.
I'm Leo Notenboom and this is Askleo.com. Thanks for watching.