Is there any advantage in paying for Win XP Pro instead of Win XP Home to run on Parallels Desktop? I got a iMac Core 2 with 2GB of RAM.
There's a list of differences between the two provided in this table on Microsoft's website. Many of the features in Pro are geared towards simplified remote administration and enhanced Windows network filesystem features (e.g., offline files mentioned below). Home also doesn't have multiprocessor support, but that's not something Parallels currently takes advantage of, anyway. Four in that list that may be relevant are that Pro includes Windows Remote Desktop, IIS (for website hosting), Offline files and folders (useful for keeping offline copies of files if you have a laptop and connect to a Windows network), and EFS (encrypting file system). For me EFS was the only feature I really wanted to make sure I had, so that swayed me towards Pro; otherwise it would have been Home. I'm using XP and Vista in a home environment so that we don't have to have (yet another... ) computer. If my use were for my work or a home business I'd definitely suggest Pro.
Home has multi-core support, so you would see both cores if , e.g. you installed XP Home on anything but a Mac Pro with Boot Camp. Presumably, if/when Parallels provides multi-core support, they will write it so that the VM looks like a multi-core rather than a multi-processor machine.
