I just got an HP MediaSmart Home Server (running the Windows version of that name).

Does anyone else have one? Got any tricks or advice? HPH

 

Not me but I looked at the demo and it looks pretty slick.

How much if you don't mind me asking? After I pay off my deadbeat Uncle (Sam) next month I may be able to afford one.

 

Yep, I used an older machine to as the server and installed the Home Server software. It's great if you want to use it as a backup and media server. I have all of my music ripped to it and use my laptop to stream to any room in the house.

The one trick that I have used is to give every computer the same password. It seems to get a little fidgety when you use a different password on a computer, and you try to log in. Other than that, it works fine.

 

I used an old pentium 4 and bought the software from Newegg. I have since had to add additional storage, but I am just using a USB 750GB drive hanging on.

You can actually build a fairly light weight machine as a server, it's really just a file system/storage box, so performance is probably not an issue.

 

The new HP servers (generation 2) got 2GBytes of RAM and a 2GHz Celeron processor in response to Gen 1 user gripes; the lower end one is bumped up against $600, with the higher end at about $750.

I like the password trick, Zippy, and I'll use it. I've already run into that little issue, although more because of my own various setups than because of WinHS. Otherwise, it's pretty easy -- I've already got one system backed up.

And it doesn't seem to like being treated as a real Windows system (installing new software is strongly discouraged). Mine came with the McAfee anti-everything suite (and it installed for free), so I'm going with that rather than subverting the anti-installation protocols.

I did find a trick to allow use of the box with WinHS as a print server as well as a file server, and that's my next thing to try. HPH