Determining the version of XP
I received an interesting comment to one of my recent blog posts...the poster was musing that he wished he could determine the version of XP (Home or Pro), presumably during a post-mortem examination. As this struck my interest, I began to research this...and most of what I found applies to a live running system. For example, MS has a KB article that tells you how to determine the version of XP you've got. Also, the WMI class Win32_OperatingSystem has a value called "SuiteMask" which will let you determine the version of the operating system; to see if you're on the Home version of XP, perform a logical AND operation with the SuiteMask value and 0x0200 (the "Personal" bit) - if it succeeds, you're on XP Home. You can also use the Win32::GetOSVersion() function in Perl, or implement the WMI Win32_OperatingSystem class in Perl.
This information seems to be maintained in memory, and appears to be retrieved using the GetVersionEx() API function. Running a couple of tests to extract the information while running RegMon doesn't appear to reveal anything interesting as far as Registry keys that are accessed while attempting to determine the OS version.
During a post-mortem examination, you can go to the file "%WinDir%\system32\eula.txt" and locate the last line of the file that begins with "EULAID", and you'll see something similar to:
EULAID:XPSP2_RM.0_PRO_OEM_EN
If it says "HOM" instead of "PRO", you're dealing with the Home version of XP.
Also, you can try the file "%windir%\system32\prodspec.ini", and right below the line that says "[Product Specification]", you'll see an entry that will tell you which version of the OS you're working with (note: be sure to check the last modification date on these files, as well...).
Links
Determine the version of IE installed
Check the Version of Office XP
Determine the Windows version using C# (using VB)
32- or 64-bit version of Windows?
This information seems to be maintained in memory, and appears to be retrieved using the GetVersionEx() API function. Running a couple of tests to extract the information while running RegMon doesn't appear to reveal anything interesting as far as Registry keys that are accessed while attempting to determine the OS version.
During a post-mortem examination, you can go to the file "%WinDir%\system32\eula.txt" and locate the last line of the file that begins with "EULAID", and you'll see something similar to:
EULAID:XPSP2_RM.0_PRO_OEM_EN
If it says "HOM" instead of "PRO", you're dealing with the Home version of XP.
Also, you can try the file "%windir%\system32\prodspec.ini", and right below the line that says "[Product Specification]", you'll see an entry that will tell you which version of the OS you're working with (note: be sure to check the last modification date on these files, as well...).
Links
Determine the version of IE installed
Check the Version of Office XP
Determine the Windows version using C# (using VB)
32- or 64-bit version of Windows?