bruceb news

I’ve been involved in the setup of two HP MediaSmart EX475 Windows Home Servers recently. The Windows Home Server software is simply elegant, and HP has enhanced it to make setup go remarkably smoothly.

At a couple of points I marveled at the technology that made some steps seem easy during setup. In a few clicks, I had a web site name assigned to a server and registered with a dynamic DNS service so it will turn up online regardless of what kind of broadband service is available. It’s free, included in the price of the server, and could not have been simpler. […] continued

Here’s a review worth reading of HP’s MediaSmart Server, built on Windows Home Server. It’s got a nice summary of Windows Home Server features and the added features supplied by HP to both simplify and extend it.

Microsoft’s Windows Home Server just arrived on the market – and it’s what you want for Xmas.

I’ll give you a short overview and some links for you to click on, but let’s do some superlatives first. Windows Home Server is the coolest technology to arrive in years! It’s innovative, it’s beautifully designed, it does a lot of exceptionally useful things in elegant ways, and it’s open for third parties to extend it in the future. This is seriously good stuff.

Let’s get oriented. Microsoft has created software named “Windows Home Server,” but you won’t buy the software separately. You’ll buy a device made by HP or Iomega or Intel or a host of others that runs the Windows Home Server software. […] continued

As always, there’s new technology that’s becoming commonplace even though we hadn’t really noticed it yet. Let’s start with network-attached storage – “NAS.”

Our appetite for storage space is voracious. Businesses and law firms are scanning documents furiously, continuing to dream of the paperless office that always seems to elude them. Law firms, in particular, are getting warehouses of paper presented on CDs and DVDs both from clients and opposing counsel during the discovery process.

Homes are more likely to have multiple computers, and these days there’s always somebody downloading movies and TV shows faster than they can watch them, and filling up hard drives that seemed spacious not long ago. […] continued

I’ve mentioned Microsoft’s upcoming Windows Home Server appliance before, but it bears repeating – this has the potential to define a new category of home appliance that will be more interesting than you expect. It’s hard for you to imagine why a product with “server” in the name will enter your house, but it addresses some common problems in imaginative ways.

If you haven’t looked at the feature list for Windows Home Server yet, browse through this overview. Imagine something compact, inexpensive, and reasonably easy to use that accomplishes these things (and more):

“The backup service backs up every every computer on the network, automatically, using a clever storage system that makes efficient use of disk space on the server.

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Here’s a review of a beta release of Microsoft Windows Home Server, which continues to look like a genuinely exciting advance for home computing. Here are my earlier thoughts on the preview at the Consumer Electronics show last month.

When it is final, most of us will see it preloaded on separate, dedicated devices; there will also be a software-only version for people who want to build their own boxes. The devices will be surprisingly small, and all signs are good for them to be extremely easy to use and remarkably useful. Here’s the overview from PC Magazine:

“This week, Microsoft unveiled beta 2 of Windows Home Server (WHS), the company’s effort to improve and simplify the computing and digital-media experience for the increasing proportion of households that have broadband connections and multiple PCs or PC-like devices such as XBox gaming consoles.

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Microsoft is taking the wraps off “Windows Home Server” today at a trade show. The first details are just coming out from people freed from their nondisclosure agreements. Here’s Microsoft’s first public web site for Home Server. I’m impressed by the feature list – if Microsoft can actually come through with something that reliably delivers on these promises, it will be very interesting indeed.

The idea is to have a box in the closet (literally – no monitor used with the Home Server) on a home network, holding all of your music/photos/videos. It’s accessible in reasonably easy sorts of ways, and has a number of things built in to make sure everything is backed up – not once, but twice. […] continued