I'm helping a friend set up several computers that he wants to have access
to the internet.  His internet provider service has already set up a
gateway/router that I think has a 24 port switch.  Since he's not really
concerned about file sharing between these computers, just giving them
access to the internet, I was thinking that WinXP Home would be adequate to
meet his needs.  I didn't think a domain based network would be necessary.
I've since seen that WinXP Home has a limitation of 5 peer to peer networked
computers and WinXP Pro has a limitation of 10 peer to peer networked
computers.  Does this mean that using WinXP Home is pretty much out of the
question, since I'm pretty sure he'll have more than 5 computers?  If he
should end up with as many as a dozen computers accessing the internet
through the same connection, will he need a domain based network in order to
to this?

I'm pretty comfortable with the small home networks that are easily achieved
with a NAT router, since the built in DHCP makes these relatively painless,
but I'm new to domain based networking.  I'm beginning to realize that I
probably need to get familiar with it in order to be of some help in this
situation.

I also realize that I'm asking questions that may not easily be answered in
the format of a brief email, so feel free to suggest some web based
resources for me to read up on to better understand these issues.

Thanks,

John Sproule

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