The consumer at large has been riding on an MS-DOS derived codebase far far too long. After much angst, Microsoft is finally poised to wean the world from DOS for good, with it's two new operating systems, WindowsXP Home Edition, and WindowsXP Professional.

We've done a couple of preview articles going over some of the features of the operating system in general, primarily focusing on the Home Edition.See here and here. Since both are hitting retail shelves on the 25th, we feel it's time to take a look at the general feature sets of each, basic requirements, and the approved upgrade paths, so that you can make the decision to get the version of XP that you need.

WindowsXP Professional is more or less an evolution of features over the Home edition, so first off let's take a look at XP Home.