In the summer of 2007 Microsoft released Windows Home Server. As you can probably tell form the name the product is a server targeted for the home. Last week I had the chance to try out the product, from what I read on the Microsoft site it seems a pretty impressive product. The software is based on the solid foundations of Microsoft Windows Small Business Server 2003, so it will be reliable and I found this and the product didn’t crash whilst I was testing the product.

The first thing that surprised me is that the minimum specification of the product is 512mb of Ram and 60 GB hard drive compared to Windows Server 2003, although the minimum specification is 256mb Ram. I find this rather odd as the Windows Home Server is a stripped down version of Windows Server 2003. It won’t be doing as many tasks and providing as many services as the full blown Windows Server 2003 product does in large network environments.

I began the installation simply booting from the DVD. Windows doesn’t let you customise the partitions of the hard drive and it takes over not giving the user the choice were to install it. The first part of the installation the countdown timer was stuck on 51 minutes, no big issue but still a glitch. The installation took a lot longer than I thought I have done many installations of Windows Server with my job. This cut down version look a lot longer to install than the full product. Before the installation was finished it rebooted 4 or 5 times. What was little a frustrating.

Before I installed the product I read the Microsoft Windows Home Server reviewers guide written by Microsoft. The guide gave the impression the product is an all singing all dancing product. But I found the product to be a major letdown. The main feature of the product is to perform remote backups and allow these backups to be stored on the server. All the other features you can do on a standard Windows XP & Windows Vista computer.

The server allows you to share folder and apply permissions to the folders. For example you could allow Joe Bloggs have full access to a folder but do not allow Andrew Smith do anything to the same folder. You can do this in Windows Vista computer no not a Windows XP computer.

Another feature the product has is remote access. You can only use this if you have a static IP address and unfortunately most consumer broadband packages don’t have this. Most have a dynamic IP address, the IP dynamic address changes every time you connect to the internet or over a period of time. You can use a similar feature in Windows XP & Vista called remote desktop web connection with this you can control the computer from any remote computer. In fact you have flexibility with remote desktop web connection and do allows you to do more than the remote connection in the Windows Home Server.

On the whole the product is a letdown and to be honest I would not recommend this product to anybody. I would recommend using an existing Windows 2000, XP & Vista base unit as a server.

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