Why does our IT dept suddenly think Win7 Home is insecure campared with Pro?

Question

My boss has a netbook with Win7 Home on it which he won somewhere. Someone at our factory MIS/IT dept. originally set up with the SonicWall VPN client to be able to connect to our factory network (1700 miles away). Suddenly that person thought that Win7 Home was insecure and that he had to have Win7 Pro but, didn't say why (we never did anything about that). He also thought that Firefox was insecure for some reason and removed it from a friend's computer at our factory, when she needed it to work with a website of a major credit card company that would not work properly with the older Internet Explorer in WinXP. That person left our company since then.

More recently we changed from using the Sonic Wall VPN client to using Dell NetExtender (Dell bought SonicWall). My boss' Outlook (to Exchange server) worked fine with the SonicWall VPN client, but with NetExtender Outlook kept disconnecting/reconnecting, so it would take awhile before it could connect long enough to download mail and sometimes could not send mail. There are no other problems on NetExtender and even Outlook works fine on our office network connected with SonicWall VPN hardware to our factory network.

I connected TeamViewer, so our factory could diagnose the Outlook NetExtender issue, and the only answer from someone who has been there much longer was that we could not use Win7 Home, that it needed Pro.

In remote offices we do not have to log into a Windows domain. And to get on to any factory Windows computers someone would have to know a computer name and path along with username/password (WINS is no longer propagated to remote offices, so we cannot search for factory computers). So in that light, what makes Win7 Home so insecure and unacceptable compared with Win7 Pro, when if someone got unauthorized access to a computer it would actually be more difficult for someone not logged into the domain who would need to know path/username/password to access factory computers, than someone with automatic domain credentials? In other words what makes Pro more secure than Home Windows versions when not on a domain?

Answer 1

With Windows 7 Professional, you can be joined to a domain. With Windows 7 Home Premium, you cannot. That's the only reason I can think of for their preference for Windows 7 Pro.

Answer 2

The home version give you good networking support in a small network, So it was chosen, i think

Answer 3

Anyone who uses the home version for an office network needs their heads examined. It has VERY poor network support, and is insecure on a lot of ways. And anyone gaining access to the network does NOT need a path and user name /password. If they get that far they can get every details of the network and can easily get further. And you should have ALL the machines on a domain, that increases security by about 50 % as it no longer needs network packets containing user names and passwords to be sent all round the network. Microsoft OS is insecure enough without making a present of Home versions to the hackers.