personal is kind of the product to follow on after Winme, while professional is kinda in the vein of workstation.
personal supports only one cpu, and i think a max ram limit. it doesnt include things like remote desktop either. probably more differences too

does one have better games and multimedia support than the other?

There no diff other then Dual CPU support
& bit more Administrative stuff & Network stuff.

well pr-man, as of now, yeah Personal runs games and multimedia better as far as my machine is concerned. I noticed a few games that didn't run in professional, but ran in personal. I can't remember which, I installed a lot of games. But Personal is defintely the home user OS.

shs, you know if personal has remote desktop? i thought i read somewhere that it didnt.. oh well, doesnt matter.,
 
as for games, i cant imagine why thered be a difference, unless your very low ram and personal doesnt have as many services...
 
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<A HREF=" http://www.thewolfslair.com
" TARGET=_blank>www.thewolfslair.com
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"personal doesnt have as many services"
Wrong eat more memory then Windows2000 dose
all must 30meg more

The differences between personal and pro...probably won't be anymore significant then those between Workstation and Server. Note, I'm taking this from info that applies to NT 4, but expect it to be similar in win2k and Whistler...unless I find a reference that says otherwise. But essentially they are all the same exact OS.
 
"Many people wonder what exactly the differences are between Windows NT Workstation, Windows NT Server, and Windows NT Server, Enterprise Edition. First, Windows NT Server behaves differently than Windows NT Workstation does--Windows NT Server is optimized to be a high-performance network server platform, whereas Windows NT Workstation, although it has server capabilities, is optimized for interactive desktop use.
 
...Although Windows NT Server and Windows NT Server, Enterprise Edition, contain significant added functionality over Windows NT Workstation, the majority of the files in all three products are identical, including such core components as the executive, kernel, device drivers, utilities, and libraries. However, a number of these components operate differently depending on which edition is running.
 
How does Windows NT know which product is running? At boot time, the registry is queried and the result is stored in the system global variable MmProductType. One element of this information is in the registry key HKLM \ System \ CurrentControlSet \ Control \ ProductOptions. Changing this information is a violation of the software liscence."
 
"Inside Windows NT" second edition (39-41)
 
Basically, other then some additional services like IIS and the like (there is some addition), the differences basically come down to registry settings. But the OS is identical.

the only reason why whistler takes up more RAM is because of the looping of svchost.exe files. There are about 7 or 8 more loaded than there should be. (a bug most likely) That is why it's taking up more, otherwise, it would take equal or less RAM than win2k does. You can use a little program called tlist from the Support Tools in the /SUPPORT directory of the Whistler directory to remove some of those svchost.exe files that load on startup.
 
[This message has been edited by jdulmage (edited 25 November 2000).]

Whistler Personal
CPU:
Maximum number - 1
Minimum speed - 233 megahertz (MHz)
Recommended speed - 300 MHz
RAM:
Minimum - 64 megabytes (MB)
Maximum - 4 gigabytes (GB)
Recommended - 128 MB
Hard disk space:
Minimum - 2 GB
 
Whistler Professional (32-Bit Edition and for Intel Itanium systems)
CPU:
Maximum number - 2
Minimum CPU speed - 233 MHz
Recommended CPU speed - 300 MHz
RAM:
Minimum - 64 MB
Maximum - 4 GB
Recommended - 128 MB
Hard disk space:
Minimum - 2 GB
 
Whistler Advanced Server (32-Bit Edition and for Intel Itanium systems)
CPU:
Maximum number - 8
Minimum speed - 233 MHz
Recommended CPU speed - 300 MHz
RAM:
Minimum - 128 MB
Maximum - 8 GB
Recommended - 256 MB
Hard disk space:
Minimum - 2 GB

Also note that Whistler Personal doesn't support Multiple Monitors.
 
Just to clarify: Multiple Monitor support is when the OS can have you install 2 (or more) video cards, and use them on multiple monitors. There are also single video cards which use their own (driver) software to access multiple monitors, these should still work in the Personal version of Whistler.
 
Also, Personal is not able to join a (network) domain, although it is still able to access domain resources. Professional can join the domain.
 
Windows-Help.NET
 
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Regards,
 
Arie Slob,
InfiniSource, Inc.
http://www.infinisource.com
Internet & Windows Resources

heh. Guess home users don't need multiple monitors or a network. I can see alot of w@rez copies of Whistler Pro going around. hehehehhe