Recommended minimum spec. for the Notes client is XP Pro. Loads of netbooks are available - most running a version of XP Home on the Intel Atom. there are comments on the Internet that Notes client will run on XP Home.What are the issues anyway? Why is XP Pro ‘essential’?
Subject: Not a definitive official statement but
I’ve been running Lotus Notes 8.0.2 and 8.5 on my Lenovo Ideapad running XP Home since last fall with no problem at all - You’ll need more than 512 M memory to be really happy with it though
Subject: Notes Client on netbooks running XP Home
Thanks Susan. I was hoping users would post their experience. Strange the IBM’ers are silent on why XP Pro is needed.
Subject: business vs consumer
XP Home is for consumers, XP Pro is for business users. Lotus Notes is a business application and therefore only supported on a business OS.
I have been running Notes on XP Home for 5-6 years without any problems related to the OS being Home. I would highly recommend that you have at least 1Gb of RAM.
Hans
Subject: Notes on XP Home
Sorry Hans - I do not find that argument persuasive at all. I know there are features such as support for policies built into the Pro version of Windows but I cannot see what any of these features have to do with the Notes client.
Subject: it is probably a support statement due to Vista licensing
if you read the difference between Vista Home and Vista Business it has language that talks about personal use vs business use. And the Vista certification program has guidelines for ISV’s like IBM for what software they should support from Microsoft.
I doubt you will ever get an official statement on this. It is not officially supported. But it seems to run fine.
Subject: Windows XP Home and Notes client
So you suspect that the silence of IBM on this thread is that their contract with Microsoft re Windows prevents them supporting XP Home officially? That does make sense re the way Microsoft behaves. It is pretty clear by now that not much is left out of XP Home compared to Pro - it is mainly the graphics interfaces to edit the registry. There is not much that cannot be set up in XP Home via registry hacks - at tleast that is what seems clear from the computer mags I read.
Subject: Why we support various operating systems
Unfortunately, we have a limited amount of development and testing resources, making it important for us to choose to spend them wisely. At the outset of any project, we determine where those resources are best spent given our target market.
In the case of Windows, we wanted to get the “most bang for our buck”. We chose to test on versions of Windows that are seen as a superset of the others, as well as those specifically made for our target market. The idea of focusing on a superset is that, while we do not specifically state support for other versions (i.e., general subsets), we have the greatest chance of producing a product that runs on all versions. We would like to state official support for all flavors of Windows, but it is not pragmatic, given that we don’t have the resources to test on all flavors.
Hope that helps.
Dwight Morse
Product Manager, IBM Lotus Notes
Subject: You have to stop thinking technology