OT: Don't Buy XP Home

[SpaceBadger]

Hi, y'all. I just dropped back in this evening to search for an old thread w/ some comments by Fyron about fine-tuning XP, and here y'all are talking about it right now. Whaddyaknow?

So far I've taken the approach that PvK and SJ espouse above, sticking w/ Win98SE on all of my machines because it does what I need it to do and I've seen no reason to move to XP. Except that now my boys have a couple of games that need XP to run, plus they have some Christmas money that they'd like for me to use to put XP on their machines, so I guess the time has come.

So it looks like I should buy XP Pro (and I think that is what Fyron had recommended before, in that old thread I was coming here to re-read), but are there different variations of that? Seems like last time I checked TigerDirect they had several different XP Pro packages listed. I've also been told that I should get the "corporate" version of XP Pro because that doesn't do all of the "phone home" crap, but have not had much luck on finding out where to get this.

Also, where is a good place to buy it from? Any recommendations on that?

Also, Fyron, I think you mentioned before doing a lot of fine-tuning to XP Pro to make it work a lot better than it would right out of the box; can you point me to any good site or FAQ w/ instructions/suggestions on that fine-tuning?

And regarding this WMF exploit, would it be useful to just remove the file associations that go with that extension, so that if you run across one it wouldn't open/display? Or would IE try to display it anyway, thereby running the embedded virus?