- May 19, 2011
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In my line of work I occasionally get providers of equipment/software say that their software needs the 'Professional' version of Windows.
AFAIK, there are very few differences between Win10 Home and Pro. The shortest explanation is that if you want to join a domain, do group policy type stuff and other customisations that are plausible to want to roll out to a network of computers, then you need Pro. In older versions of Windows it was sometimes pertinent to check the maximum usable memory between Home and Pro but given that Win10 Home can handle a maximum of 128GB RAM vs 2TB with Pro, this point has been increasingly moot.
Normally my response to such providers depends on how the customer feels about it. Shelling out another say £40 to get a single shinier Windows licence is often hardly worth arguing over. I suppose it's theoretically possible that if a hardware driver is involved that the driver might be designed to refuse to install on a non Pro machine, but why on earth would anyone except Microsoft bother to waste their time working on such a 'feature'? I've encountered situations before (usually caused by Intel) whereby a piece of hardware that is meant to be 'desktop only' will give the admin grief if they try to install it on a Windows Server OS because they want Server users to buy Intel 'Server' class hardware.
Sometimes the provider will just respond saying that they've only tested it on Pro so therefore the requirements say Pro.
In this particular scenario the hardware is a 3D scanner (network connected though) for a dental practice and the provider has allegedly told the customer that it will work 'better' on Pro. I'm trying to contact the provider because it potentially means a lot of OS changes for the customer and resulting labour/licence costs are not insignificant, especially given that the customer is highly unlikely to need Pro for any other reason.
Sources:
https://www.microsoft.com/en-gb/windows/compare
https://gadgets.ndtv.com/laptops/fe...indows-10-pro-differences-new-features-718532
https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/wi...ws-releases#physical-memory-limits-windows-10
AFAIK, there are very few differences between Win10 Home and Pro. The shortest explanation is that if you want to join a domain, do group policy type stuff and other customisations that are plausible to want to roll out to a network of computers, then you need Pro. In older versions of Windows it was sometimes pertinent to check the maximum usable memory between Home and Pro but given that Win10 Home can handle a maximum of 128GB RAM vs 2TB with Pro, this point has been increasingly moot.
Normally my response to such providers depends on how the customer feels about it. Shelling out another say £40 to get a single shinier Windows licence is often hardly worth arguing over. I suppose it's theoretically possible that if a hardware driver is involved that the driver might be designed to refuse to install on a non Pro machine, but why on earth would anyone except Microsoft bother to waste their time working on such a 'feature'? I've encountered situations before (usually caused by Intel) whereby a piece of hardware that is meant to be 'desktop only' will give the admin grief if they try to install it on a Windows Server OS because they want Server users to buy Intel 'Server' class hardware.
Sometimes the provider will just respond saying that they've only tested it on Pro so therefore the requirements say Pro.
In this particular scenario the hardware is a 3D scanner (network connected though) for a dental practice and the provider has allegedly told the customer that it will work 'better' on Pro. I'm trying to contact the provider because it potentially means a lot of OS changes for the customer and resulting labour/licence costs are not insignificant, especially given that the customer is highly unlikely to need Pro for any other reason.
Sources:
https://www.microsoft.com/en-gb/windows/compare
https://gadgets.ndtv.com/laptops/fe...indows-10-pro-differences-new-features-718532
https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/wi...ws-releases#physical-memory-limits-windows-10