Discussion "Win10 Pro works better than Home from a performance perspective"?

[mikeymikec]

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

 

[mindless1]

The provider needs to elaborate on what "better" means. If an important feature is missing so be it but if it's just some vague performance claim, insist on it being quantified. Sometimes people mean well but have no idea WTF they're talking about.

 

[mikeymikec]

It ended up being a wild goose chase, but the provider acted very oddly about it: They wrote in their documentation that it's HIGHLY RECOMMENDED to have Win10 Pro, then the 'Pro' bit came down to a case of "well, we haven't tested it on Win10 Home" when they were pressed on that point. They even had the cheek to say that if it being Win10 Home ended up taking their on-site engineers longer to install and set up their stuff that they'd charge extra, whereas my feeling is that if they were too lazy to do adequate testing then this is an opportunity for them to address that, and they bear the brunt of any potential extra cost of their laziness in exchange for being able to give their customers better advice in future.

Due to the particular circumstances for the customer in question, their threat wasn't really relevant (the provider was installing their own laptop with Pro and while there was a choice of installing the software on additional workstations, it wasn't strictly speaking needed).

 

[Ketchup]

This is not uncommon with proprietary software. The software developer is in a time crunch to make sure the software works for group A, who all run software configuration B, so they aren't going to take time to make sure it works with configurations C through Z since no one will be running it that way. So it could work no problem, but if the user reports a problem, the developer won't do anything about it when he sees that the user is running a different configuration.

 

[BarkingGhostar]

I find it amusing when I see businesses running consumer (ahem, Home) versions of software and or services. For instance, some businesses are so cheap that they waited forever to get email instead of faxing everything, or banks moving their ATM machines over to DSL (best effort) from ISDN/DS0 (SLA). I always question how professional of a business are you, Mr. Biz, if you are a token website and Win98SE office?

 

[Atreus21]

Reminds me of when I saw some accounting software, the install instructions for which heavily emphasized that it needed to be installed on computers running Intel processors with Active Management Technology version 9 or higher.

I dearly wanted to ask them what on earth their accounting software had to do with the feature-set AMT permits IT professionals to harness.

Some people see cool sounding terms and brand names and put it into their documentation, I guess.