Product Description

Windows Home Server, a new way to simplify how you keep and share your family's photos, videos, and music. This smart hub lives in your home and connects all the important people in your life to the good stuff that's on your computers. You can pump your family's tunes to your Xbox 360, share baby pics over the Web, and even get on your home server when you are not home. Friends and family can see and share any files you want, whether they are in another room or another country.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #129 in Software
• Brand: Microsoft OEM Licence
• Model: CCQ-00061
• Released on: 2008-10-27
• Platforms: Windows Vista, Windows XP
• Format: Closed-captioned
• Original language: English
• Dimensions: .80" h x 8.70" w x 5.40" l, .21 pounds

Features

• 333773

Manufacturer's Description
For years, you've used servers in the office. It's time to start using one at home. With Windows Home Server, you can easily back up, access, share, and store all your family's digital media.With Power Pack 1 your Windows Home Server experience just got easier, faster, and more reliable. Power Pack 1 is a complete set of enhancements for your Windows Home Server. It combines all previous updates, fixes known issues, and adds new features to improve how you protect, connect and share your files and digital content.

Customer Reviews

Just what I needed...
I've just purchased this having installed the free 120 day evaluation version which is available directly from Microsoft. In that time, it's dropped £30 in price!!

This is a server operating system based on MS Server 2003, which I have installed on my daughter's old AMD Athlon 1800+ desktop which became surplus on the arrival of a new laptop last birthday. I've not had any experience of servers before and the installation process was a doddle - you put the CD in the drive of your spare computer, plug it into a wired network socket on your router and away it goes to become your new Home Server. Once it's finished, every other computer on your network needs to install Home Server client software..and hey presto, you're up and running.

OK, but what does it do?? I'm not sure I've even scratched the surface yet, but this is what mine does...

I've installed Samsung Laser and HP Inkjet printers on it and it acts as print server for any computer in the house. (XP drivers seem to work fine for basic printers, but from reading forums I don't think scanners etc will work).

This means that you never have to plug a laptop into a printer again, just sit working wirelessly on your laptop on the sofa, click print in the usual way..and the print spools out of the printer connected to the Home Server.

All of our music, files and photographs are in folders on the Home Server which are shared and available to me, my wife and daughter with varying degrees of security and access (e.g. I have full control, whereas my daughter can only look at the photographs (not delete or change), but she can write new music to the Home Server when she rips new CDs.

This means that, no matter which computer you log onto, all of your files are available to you.

The Home Server backs itself up and also backs up each client computer.

This means that, using the supplied rescue disk you should be able to restore any computer or data if you have a serious problem.

Each computer has a new notification icon on the Windows toolbar which changes colour if anything needs attention. This means that, for example, I get a warning if my daughter's virus software finds a problem, or is out-of-date.

The Home Server can be enabled to provide a web-site and address, as well as remote access, so that you can log onto your home network from any internet enabled computer, anywhere in the world and download from / upload files to your Home Server (provided it's turned on) and even print out a document on a printer at home from anywhere in the world if you really want to!). Note - we have relatively slow broadband where we live so this is fairly slow for large files, but it's a good trick.

A few things you need to consider...

Disc Storage Space - there's no point in building a server unless it can handle all the data you need, so I installed 2 x 500GB HDDs in my Home Server. This gives me about a TB of storage in theory, but I've got full back up turned on, so this really provides 500GB of fully backed up storage (WHS automatically copies all data across both drives, so if one fails, the data isn't lost).

Energy Usage - a PC turned on all the time will burn a lot of electricity (especially if you use an ond one like mine) - and get quite warm, so I've stripped out everything it doesn't need (Sound card, fancy graphics card, floppy disc drive, DVD burner) and added a big fan to keep it cool. I've also changed the network card for one fitted with Wake on LAN (WOL) which means that, if a piece of software called Lights Out is installed, the Home Server will go to sleep if no clients are active on the network and then wake up automatically when it detects an active client.

This brings me onto one final point - read the "We Got Served" forum - this is excellent for all aspects of WHS...and gives you details of loads of Add Ons (such as Lights Out) most of which are free to download for installation.

I've also installed Firefly Media server on my Home Server. This provides a central "point" for iTunes to access its music from - so no more messing around with the frustrating business of libraries etc. All of our computers can now access all of our music through iTunes- with no input from me at all now!

You can probably tell that i'm impressed with this - yes, there are a few glitches and it took me a while to get my head around the difference between the Home Server desktop and the Home Server Console, but I'm no computer expert by any stretch of the imagination..so if I can do it, so can anyone else with a bit of patience.

Recommended

Not for the faint-hearted
This does everything that I wanted it to do, and I am really pleased with it. What I wasn't prepared for, despite getting the evaluation copy first, is that new motherboards with SATA designed for PC's, and this don't particularly mix too well. To cut a long story short, I finshed up running this under VMWare as I could not get the install to run on my hardware, even to the first stage (Lots of Google searches and forum searches later). So, choose your hardware with extreme care. If the hardware has no Win2003 server drivers then expect problems. Now it is up and running I have no complaints. I have used the recovery feature twice (purely for testing rather than in anger) using both XP and Windows 7RC. It is so much easier, simpler and much faster than having to do a base O/S restore and then reload all the Apps and data back. I am sure there are other products out there that will do this too, but the simplicity of this is great, especially coupled with all the file-sharing functions.

exelent operating system
this is the most best server operating system i have found so fare that is easy to use

been useing this for about 2 yers now and it is good for backing up all your computers on the network and storing all your files