Windows Home Server

// April 17th, 2008 // random

I was walking through Best Buy this week and saw the newly released Windows Home Server… so I bought one. Not sure why exactly, other than that I am a tech whore and it looked neat. I’m also assuming that it will be able to solve all kinds of problems that I never knew I had.

Windows HOme ServerGenerally it is pretty cool. I tiny little box with 1TB of storage and Windows Server 2003 running off a somewhat underpowered AMD Sempron processor. The system is headless (that is no monitor output) so you have to log in through another computer using Remote Desktop Connection but once you do that the system is incredibly simple. Actually because it doesn’t need (or have) a monitor I was able to just hide it behind some books on a bookcase.

All your photos, videos and music reside centrally on the server and then any networked computer or appliance (Xbox 360, PS3) in the house has access to all your stuff. It even automatically copies all of your iTunes music to the server and then makes it available to everyone in the house. Backups of everyone’s computers can be automated and you can even log in from an network connection to access all of your stuff.

It’s also great because I can use the Web GUI to run uTorrent on the box continuously and then serve up tasty episodes of Battlestar to my theatre over the intranet. FTR you clearly know that I am a geek from the first half of this post anyway so my admission of Gallactic fandom need not diminish my rep any further.

Anyway the only issue I’ve had so far is kind of a large one but I’m hoping it will be resolved soon. The Server Connect software doesn’t seem to want to instal properly on Rachel’s notebook. She can log in using her Windows account and access the content but the automated tasks can’t be instituted until I can get the client software up and running. Plans for tonight anyone?

2 Responses to “Windows Home Server”

  1. nathan colquhoun says:
    April 24, 2008 at 9:29 pm

    Very cool…I’m in the process of trying to do that now with an old computer using linux….the possibilities are endless.

  2. jeremy says:
    May 3, 2008 at 3:40 pm

    Dude, no kidding this thing is super cool. I was thinking about building a linux box but the form factor on the HP is awesome.

    FTR the 470 model is $150 cheaper.
    but for the $150 bucks you can easily add a 500GB drive to the bring the total up to 1TB matching tyhe 475 model AND add in 2GB of RAM quadrupling the measily 512MB you start with.

Leave a Reply