XP Home support period
This is something you should consider if you are looking to abandoned a pre-Winxp operating system in favor of a flavor of XP. The product life cycle. In their infinite wisdom, Microsoft has different support plans for consumer products than “business-products”. As such… arstechnica.com has a post explaining why support for Windows XP Home will end the end of this year 12/31/06 and Windows XP Pro will continue to be supported perhaps as long as December of 2013.
What this means is quite probably, no security updates for XP Home after December 31st of this year. (2006). Arstechnica is hoping Microsoft will revisit this policy and make modifications to their policy.
I’m not holding my breath – I suspect they expect Vista to be out this year and expect home users to either upgrade to XP Pro (paying twice for a VERY similar product), or upgrade to Vista.