The differences are not very big and casual home users will find XP Home Edition sufficient.
Windows XP Professional Edition has the following differences:
Administrative Tools in the Start Menu and Control Panel
Automated System Recovery
Boot Configuration Manager
DriverQuery
Group Policy Refresh Utility
Multi-lingual User Interface (MUI) add-on
NTFS Encryption Utilitiy
Offline Files and Folders
OpenFiles
Performance Log Manager
Remote Desktop
Scheduled Tasks Console
Security Template Utility
Taskkill
Tasklist
Telnet Administrator
XP professional also provides support for multi-processor systems (several CPUs), Dynamic Disks and Fax.
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For some reason, this isn’t enabled by default.
To be able to view the hibernate option, just press shift in the shutdown menu and Standby will be replaced by hibernate. To switch back to standby, release shift.

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Alt+Tab – Switching between open windows.
Hold down Alt and press tab repeatedly to select any open window.
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This feature is very useful if you have only one user account on your computer and you want it to log in every time you start up your computer.
Open the Start Menu and select run. Type “control userpasswords2″ into the box.
In the user accounts window choose the users tab and clear the box “Users must enter a name and password to use this computer”.
Click OK and type your user name and password in the dialog box.
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It’s fun to have a customized sound scheme. You can change the sounds that xp plays when you start your computer, log on, receive an error, etc. You can even record your own sounds.
To change the sound scheme:
Go to Control panel from the Start menu and click on Sounds, speech and audio devices.
Click on change the sound scheme.
Save your previous scheme if you want to and click on any event in the Program Events box to choose its sound.
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Often when your desktop freezes, or the taskbar disappears when you close a program, you don’t normally have to restart your computer, as often this just the case of explorer not responding. To fix this, open Task Manager by pressing Ctrl+Alt+Delete. Click on the Processes tab and look for explorer.exe. End it if it’s there and go back to Applications. Click on New Task and type explorer in the box and run it. Your desktop should reappear in a few seconds.
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