I just upgraded my old Toshiba laptop to a new Toshiba laptop. Seeing as the factory install of Win98 on the old laptop was the most robust instance of Windows I’ve used, I opted to stick with the factory WinXP install on the new, the only drawback being that it’s XP Home.
The one problem I’d anticipated was a possible problem connecting to my wireless network. Aside from WinXP getting in the way with it’s bloody wireless network wizard and the time it took to find the MAC of the wireless card, it turned out to be simple.
What I didn’t expect was the lack of a web server. And it wasn’t just the lack of a web server, but the crippling of the operating system so you can’t even install Microsoft Personal Web Server:
Windows XP Home Edition does not include or support any versions (1.0, 2.0, 4.0) of Microsoft Personal Web Server (PWS). Users that need Web server functionality in a desktop operating system should use Windows XP Professional
It seems that there used to be a workaround in the knowledge base, but the scum at Microsoft yanked it in an attempt to force punters into upgrading to XP Professional. Alas, this way of thinking just pisses people off and makes them look elsewhere. In my case, that was Apache and, thanks to Webifying XP, it was a simple and painless process.
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