When I see what is coming in Powerpack 3, and what HP is offering in their EX900 series, I am left with a strange feeling that Microsoft & HP consider a home server to be inconsequential, like a printer. Instead of enhancing Windows, HP seems to say, if you want those features, throw away your EX700 series and buy a 900 series. I cannot imagine why one has to copy one’s music, movies or pictures to a shared directory instead of having it automatically moved after designating it to be shared. So I must devise a system of determining what must be replicated to the server.

I am not a genius, but if the WHS was my project, I would first determine what is to be shared, move or copy those files to a shared directory, then eliminate the shared files from a backup. Otherwise, you end up with 3 versions of giant directories. Eventually, MS and HP will figure that out and design another server that fixes this and many other simple problems, but I know they will tell me to buy another server to get the solution.

I feel as though my EX700 series does nothing but backups, little more than a USB HD, until I put third party software on it, but MS is beginning to fix that. Those fixes should be as much a part of WHS as fixing viruses and security is a part of XP or Vista. If HP, in their infinite wisdom, designs a server so anemic that adding those fixes would break their server, it either shows an amazing lack of forsight or incredible planned obsolesence. (Obsolete in 1 year?)

putting whs into standby isnt the most reliable way to save power. I find that standby doesnt work that well all the time, plus its prone to WHS turning itself on whenever it feels like. I prefer the manual way of shutting it down properly with shutdown.exe as a task using the motherboard bios to RTC turn it back on. The sheduled task manager is more flexible too.. i.e. I have mine turning off weekdays but staying on at weekends as it does cleanup ops on sunday and sat night I might be up really late watching films off it.