Dell 1505 and windows XP mce or XP pro?

XP MCE is basically a superset of XP Pro. Anything XP Pro does can be done in MCE, except join a domain. You are unlikely to need this at your school, but you should probably ask them to make sure.

You can compare the various versions of XP here: http://www.microsoft.com/windowsxp/evaluation/compare.mspx

Well now, dwaris has already said that MCE is being offered for free, and you can't get Pro or Home any cheaper than that. And any bugs in MCE I've seen reported do not interfere with the functioning of the non-MCE part of the operating system. So if he gets MCE, and chooses not to use the MCE programs, he gets a perfectly functioning XP Pro for free. It's a bargain.

And if the MCE works well, as it does for me- it's a no-brainer!

What major are you planning on taking up? If it's something like mechanical engineering, and requires a lot of 3D cad, get a good video card. Even matlab and mathematica with 3d graphing requires a good card.

Neither XP pro, nor home, nor mce will run your software any faster than one another. One thing to keep in mind is that mce has a lot of additional software, some of which is really buggy. I have an inspiron 6000, a very similar notebook to the e1505. If dell doesn't produce a better driver for the ati video card, you will get blue screens like crazy when your run the media center program. I am so frustrated that I want to install home edition or pro. I would say get home edition if you can because it is the cheapest, and pro won't offer any new features except networking. If you need pro, you can probably get it for a lot cheaper or even free from you university (average university price is $60 or free).

For people who don't get all the bugs I do, mce is great, and even greater with a tv tuner.