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#96710 - 04/27/08 12:29 PM
XP Home or XP Professional
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moaab
Member
Registered: 02/02/08
Posts: 467
Loc: Chicagoland
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We just bought a new Mac computer with Windows capability. Since I have to load Windows myself, I'm trying to decide which XP to use (I have Vista on my laptop and hate it!). Is Windows XP Home workable with the different platforms (I'm a student so I don't know which platform I will eventually be using), or do I need to use XP Professional? I'm not much of a techie, so any opinions are definitely appreciated!
Vikki
_________________________
Most people are about as happy as they make up their minds to be.........Abraham Lincoln's mother
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#96711 - 04/27/08 12:43 PM
Re: XP Home or XP Professional
[Re: moaab]
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hmts
New Member
Registered: 03/04/08
Posts: 20
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XP professional 
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#96716 - 04/27/08 01:22 PM
Re: XP Home or XP Professional
[Re: hmts]
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14tonks
Member
Registered: 10/25/01
Posts: 6975
Loc: Only 3rd world country in US
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If you are planning on using a computer for business, you should buy software designed for business use: XP Professional and Office, not XP Home and Works.
XP Home and all home versions of anything are aimed at people who want to do things like play music, watch videos, play games, design photo albums for grandma, write e-mail, and type up things like simple fliers for their clubs and personal letters without being hassled with configuring decent security or networking or learning any advanced software features; therefore, you will find many software, networking, and security features present in professional versions just aren't there in home versions. Can you get along without them? Depends on what you consider getting along. Sure, you can e-mail voice files and dictation back and forth, and you can fire up Works and use your computer like a typewriter with a 4-figure price tag. That's all a lot of people do, so just Home and Works would "work" for them I guess; they wouldn't meet my feature requirements or security standards, though. Whether Home is acceptable as the underlying OS for a company platform would depend on the particular company. There's no question that XP Professional would be acceptable to everyone, though.
Edited by 14tonks (04/27/08 01:35 PM)
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#96719 - 04/27/08 01:50 PM
Re: XP Home or XP Professional
[Re: 14tonks]
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moaab
Member
Registered: 02/02/08
Posts: 467
Loc: Chicagoland
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Thanks so much for your explanation, Tonks! Since I am not yet transcribing professionally, I'm not sure how voice files and dictation transfers are handled. I appreciate your taking the time to explain this, so that I will be set up properly. I don't want to be trying to make something "work" for me when I can just purchase the version that has everything that I need to work properly. Now I can run to the store and, by the end of the afternoon, have XP Professional installed.
Thanks!
_________________________
Most people are about as happy as they make up their minds to be.........Abraham Lincoln's mother
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#96722 - 04/27/08 02:17 PM
Re: XP Home or XP Professional
[Re: moaab]
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14tonks
Member
Registered: 10/25/01
Posts: 6975
Loc: Only 3rd world country in US
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You're welcome. Voice files and dictation are transferred a whole lot of different ways depending on your working situation and/or who you work for. Just keep in mind that you are looking forward to running, or working for, a business and make choices accordingly where your tools are concerned, and you should be covered. It will save a lot of time and hassle in the long run.
My philosophy in life is to always ask what are the best practices where any question is concerned rather than what is the minimum one can get away with. For one thing, you will find a lot less argument about what constitutes best practices than about whether you can afford to do without this, that, or the other specific thing.
For instance, if you have the best business software, it will work for whatever you need to do. Yep, AutoCorrect may work as a make-do expander for a while, but one of the two best professional expanders on the market will work better and will work with almost any platform or Windows program. So why not start out with something that offers the best features and the least probable future hassles or need to change the way you are accustomed to work? If you have the best security you can reasonably implement, it will be sufficient however the HIPAA rules are written or interpreted. Maybe an elaborate justification for nonimplementation will work where those addressable security points are concerned if a question of a HIPAA breach comes up--or maybe not. Ask 10 "experts," and you will get 10 different opinions about that. However, if everything is just kept encrypted end-to-end between you and your clients, whether in transit or at rest on servers and hard drives, and only you or your client can decrypt it, there's absolutely no question that you have done all you, or anyone else, could do to maintain privacy and security. That's not all that hard to do, so why get into wasting time on endless discussion, argument, and justification of lesser approaches--just encrypt it all and keep it encrypted without any 3rd party access, and you don't have to worry about anything else. Go with the KISS philosophy (Keep it simple, stupid), and you don't have to worry about a whole lot of details.
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#96730 - 04/27/08 04:44 PM
Re: XP Home or XP Professional
[Re: 14tonks]
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moaab
Member
Registered: 02/02/08
Posts: 467
Loc: Chicagoland
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You are a very wise person, Tonks. Thank you, and I will try to remember your philosophy because it really makes such good sense.
_________________________
Most people are about as happy as they make up their minds to be.........Abraham Lincoln's mother
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#96733 - 04/27/08 06:11 PM
Re: XP Home or XP Professional
[Re: moaab]
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hmts
New Member
Registered: 03/04/08
Posts: 20
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Tonks, in your opinion, what is the top grade multiplatform expander and what it the top grade line count software? I'm considering changing what I'm currently using and would appreciate the recommendations. Thanks.
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#96735 - 04/27/08 07:02 PM
Re: XP Home or XP Professional
[Re: hmts]
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14tonks
Member
Registered: 10/25/01
Posts: 6975
Loc: Only 3rd world country in US
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For an expander, I think the choice is between Shorthand and InstantText. Which you go with is largely a matter of what you find comfortable to use with the possible exception of considerations of picking something you can use uninstalled if you might work for a company that offers nothing but suboptimal tools. I prefer InstantText myself, but I would have given more consideration to Shorthand if I were contemplating a lifetime as an employee of others. Shorthand can be run completely uninstalled from an external USB drive, while InstantText does require that one file be copied to the C drive if you want to run it otherwise uninstalled--something you might find a company will not let you do. Other than that, both programs are good, and both have some unique features I wish the other had as well. I suggest trying both and making your own decision. If you will be spending your working life as an employee or IC, I would also give some thought to devising a system of shorts that is compatible with both programs so that you can switch between them with a minimal amount of pain if needs must at some point.
For a line counter, I use Practicount, but it seems to be without any real helpline/support nowadays, so I don't know that I'd recommend it to someone else. I've never really needed any support for it, but for someone else the inability to get an answer to a question might be a deal breaker. Abacus is the other one I have tried that counted very accurately, but it is Word-centric, so it really depends again on what setting you think you will be working in and what software you anticipate using.
It's very rare that any computer hardware or software question has a single one-size-fits-all answer. You always need to analyze your personal needs and priorities and then investigate what's available. It's unlikely any of the choices will be absolutely perfect, and you then have to decide which of the possible trade-offs fits your needs best.
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#96738 - 04/27/08 07:25 PM
Re: XP Home or XP Professional
[Re: 14tonks]
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hmts
New Member
Registered: 03/04/08
Posts: 20
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Thanks Tonks! I tried Practicount on the recommendation of someone else on this board (along with Sylvan and Abacas) and found, in test runs, practicount counted 100+ lines higher consistently than the other 2 programs and counting manually.
I tried to get support but being I was on a trial run, I assumed they were simply ignoring me.
I need a line counter I can absolutely count on for billing clients and I couldn't find justification for the vast discrepancy in practicount versus 3 other methods.
Any ideas on that? I don't mean to hijack this from the XP topic but while I have you captive ... ha ha
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#96742 - 04/27/08 07:50 PM
Re: XP Home or XP Professional
[Re: hmts]
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14tonks
Member
Registered: 10/25/01
Posts: 6975
Loc: Only 3rd world country in US
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No ideas at all other than it may have something to do with the way you set the parameters (it's a complex program with settings hiding a lot of different places), or it may be that you have a later version than mine, and they've broken something. (Wouldn't be the first program that's happened with.)
As I said, I don't want to be the person responsible for talking someone into using it at this point. I have no interest in serving as replacement tech support--they neglected to offer me a kickback on sales to cover that :)--and they just don't seem to be answering their e-mail from anyone these days.
When it comes to line counters, my best advice is to check any program you intend to use against a hand count of a few representative documents done the way you want to count. If the program and your hand count are not consistently the same, keep looking. It's a bit time consuming and aggravating to do that, but it is the only way you can be sure counts will be accurate and that you can prove to your clients that they are. I've hit all kinds of gotchas in the way counters count and don't count things by running that kind of validation test, and I no longer upgrade a counter to a new version until I am willing to check a couple of test counts with the new version. I've seen two programs go from accurate to inaccurate counts from one version to another.
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