Category Archives: Smart Home

ComputerWorld has a comprehesive review of Windows Home Server. “I found Home Server to be intuitive to use and very effective at backing up data as well as monitoring my home network’s health. Its simplicity and automation will make it a winner with many home users. More technically savvy users, however, may find its limitations frustrating. Microsoft has done a great job of hiding the complexities of server management in Home Server. … For my part, …Continue reading →

Terry over at We Got Served posted a nice run through of what the setup for Windows Home Server beta 2 is like. He took pictures along the way and if you are curious to see what it looks like before you get your beta kit take a gander. We Got Served Note this is probably the last post I’ll make for a while; I’m off to Africa for vacation. We are going to the Serengeti!

Until OEMs ship Windows Home Server hardware the only way to run Windows Home Server is on a machine you provide. The hardware requirements are pretty meager: An x86 CPU with roughly the same horsepower as a 1GHz Pentium III. It will actually run on less (I had it running on an old 550MHz Pentium III for a while), but for a reasonable experience you want something in this range. My current box at home …Continue reading →

My team (the Windows Home Server team) now has a blog. Here’s the abstract for this new blog. This blog is managed by the Windows Home Server team at Microsoft.  Our goal with the blog is to educate and inform families with multiple PCs about how Windows Home Server will help them easily store, protect and share their treasured photos, music, videos and documents.  We hope you enjoy the blog and find it a good source of …Continue reading →

Dan Fernandez is the lead product manager for Visual Studio Express. He just blogged about developing tools and applications for Windows Home Server using Visual Studio. + As I mentioned in my Channel9 video I’m super excited that WHS is going to enable geeks, makers, hobbyists, or whatever you want to call them to build fun and exciting things for their homes. Of course, WHS will also allow “professionals” to build products that extend the …Continue reading →

I just noticed that Matt Pietrek has been blogging about his experience playing with Windows Home Server. Matt is one of the many MS employees who have been Dogfooding the product for a while.

Windows Home Server prototype Originally uploaded by ckindel. I’ve created a Flickr group for collecting pictures of people’s home servers and other related imageshttp://www.flickr.com/groups/homeservers Inspired by the Media Center group at http://www.flickr.com/groups/mediacenter  

My Windows Home Server Originally uploaded by ckindel. This is my WHS box at home. It started out in a different case (an Antec), but I retired my wife’s old computer and it used this Lian Lai case (which I’ve always liked). So I used this as an opportunity to put in a bigger power supply (4 750GB SATA drives are just on the edge of what a 350W supply can do) and a 4 …Continue reading →

http://hardware.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/01/11/1711237   It’s quite gratifying to see the number of fans of WHS we have on this slashdot thread.  There was an earlier /. thread that pointed to an article that was ostensibly about Windows Home Server, but was really about Apple. The discussions in the thread were thus not about our product.   This thread, on the otherhand, focuses on what we’re building specificaly and therefore is actually interesting.  

HP’s offical page on their Windows Home Server powered box.  My team has a great relationship with the MediaSmart server team at HP. HP has done an outstanding job on their industrial design, mechanicals, and electronics (we have early engineering prototypes in our labs).  

My Channel 9 interview video just went live. Please don’t tease me about how often I say “um”. http://channel9.msdn.com/showpost.aspx?postid=270965