XP Professional to XP home

Downgrading from XP Professional to XP home - can it be done?

I have 4 PCs on a wireless network. The 3 PCs with XP home work fine but the PC with XP Professional doesnt enable sharing with the XP Home PCs. I have gone through the network setup wizard so many times, turning file and printer sharing on....nothing works, The XP home PCs can see the XP Prof PC but cannot access the share files or the printer attached to the XP Prof PC. I have followed all the responses to my last question on Home Network problem,....none of the suggestions work. The only solution I am left with is to downgrade the XP Prof PC back to XP home. Can this be done? I only have the manufacturers copy of XP Home which doesnt give me the Windows repair option.

Solution:- Hi,

From a licencing point of view you cannot downgrade from WinXP Pro to WinXP Home.

Manufacturer copies (OEM) of anything from Microsoft can only be installed on one PC and live and die there. This is according to the EULA.

You would need to do a fresh install to go from Pro to Home.

As you no doubt know, WinXP Pro has extra features above and beyond WinXP Home. I find the network wizard terrible in Windows and so do everything manually. If your WinXP Pro is NTFS formatted make sure you don't use any of the additional security features as this can cuase nightmares when trying to share files with FAT32 systems. There are tons of howtos on Microsoft's site regarding networking of Pro and Home. Which I won't go into as I think you're sick of trying and just want to know about the downgrading ;)