Happy Holidays from Windows Home Server!! In celebration of “Cyber Monday” and the holiday season, we figured it was the perfect time to tell you all about all of the fantastic Windows Home Server discounts that are being offered. Windows Home Server has teamed up with Acer, HP, and our newest OEM, ASUS, to provide some of the lowest prices we have ever seen for Windows Home Server.
Acer:
ASUS:
HP:
These Home Servers have been selling out fast so don’t miss your opportunity to give the ultimate gift this holiday season!
- The Windows Home Server team
Users that have installed any pre-release versions of Windows Home Server Power Packs will need to take actions to prepare for Power Pack 3. The prerequisite for successful download and installation of Power Pack 3 is to be running the correct version of Windows Home Server with Power Pack 2. If you have a beta version or a release candidate version of a Power Pack installed, you must uninstall these preliminary versions before you install this final version of Power Pack 3.
First, you’ll need to Remote Desktop into your Windows Home Server. Below are the instructions on how to complete this step for Windows XP, Windows Vista and Windows 7.
4. Click Connect.
5. When the Log On to Windows dialog box appears, type “Administrator” as the user name and use your Windows Home Server Console password as the password, and then click OK. This will begin your Remote Desktop session.
For pre-release versions of Power Pack 3:
4. Navigate to the Windows Home Server Power Pack 3 eta folder at Start > My computer > D: > Shares > Software > Windows home Server Power Pack 3 Beta.
5. Run the Uninstall.cmd file to un-install Power Pack 3 Beta. After reboot, your Home Server will revert back to your previous version.
For pre-release versions of Power Pack 1 & Power Pack 2:
Power Pack 3 will automatically install as part of Windows Update if Automatic Updates is enabled on the home server. A notification appears in the Windows Home Server Console, telling you that Power Pack 3 is ready to install. Click Install to start the installation.
After installation has completed, you can verify that the most current version of Windows Home Server by checking in the Windows Home Server console. You should see version 6.0.2423.0.
If you are still having issues and your version numbers are not the same as above, please visit our support forums where the community can assist you.
http://social.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/category/WindowsHomeServer/
If you take a look back to the Top 10 Reasons to use Windows Home Server, you can see that I have gone over the majority of these points. In this post, I am going to share a little more about items 4 and 6: libraries and user accounts.
Windows Home Server’s integration with Windows 7 libraries is one of my personal favorite features. I have 4 computers at home that hold hundreds of pictures. I love being able to share my photos with friends and family, but unfortunately before Windows Home Server, I could never find what I was looking for! It would take me up to an hour to look through all 4 computers and all of the picture folders on each PC to find a specific set of photos.
With Windows Home Server as your media server, your digital memories will be kept in a central location so that you can access what you want from any computer on the network. Integration with Windows 7 libraries means that your Windows Home Server will automatically add and store your digital memories in the libraries. This enables you to quickly access what you want from any computer on the network and save time by having all your things in one place.
*Screen shot of Pictures Library. Notice pictures in this location are from “My pictures”, “Public Pictures”, and all pictures on the home server.
Windows Home Server users, Grant and David, saw the benefits to having all of his content located in Shared Folders and stated:
Although libraries store and centralize all of your digital content, you may still want to keep particular items private, or not edited and changed by other users on your network. To increase protection on all of your important content, Windows Home Server allows you to create up to 10 user accounts. Windows Home Server gives you the ability to change which Shared Folders users have access to by either allowing “read/write” access, “read only” or “no access”.
As you can see from the image above, prominent blogger, Terry Walsh and his wife, have easily set up their user accounts. For a step by step in how to set up user accounts, you can visit Terry's blog.
To learn more about Windows Home Server along with libraries and user accounts, please visit the Windows Home Server Web site.
Feeling literary? Creative? Or maybe just passionate for the latest generation of Windows Home Server devices hitting the market? Either way, here’s your chance to win a Home Server and host of other great prizes including Zune HD players and 1 TB hard drives to help expand your storage.
Through December 11th, Intel and Microsoft are co-sponsoring A Home Server Haiku contest. To enter, simply write a haiku about how a home server would help bring peace of mind to your life—or simply why you really want one. Your name will be entered in a contest to win one of three new home servers, one of ten Zune digital audio players, or one of ten 1TB hard drives.
If you’re like me, a handy English class refresher on Haikus can be found here, courtesy of Wikipedia (simply put, it’s a poem made up of three lines of 5, 7, and 5 syllables, with thankfully no rhyming needed). :-)
More details – and the entry form - are up on the website www.winahomeserver.com.
So here’s my attempt:
Each day it helps me From its perch in my basement My little server
Each day it helps me
From its perch in my basement
My little server
I’m sure you can do better…Give it a try, and spread the word!
- Mark
The Windows Home Server Team is pleased to announce that Power Pack 3 will be available in all shipping languages (Chinese, English, French, German, Italian, Japanese, and Spanish) on November 24th, 2009. Power Pack 3 will be made available to existing users via Windows Update. Users need to have Windows Home Server with Power Pack 2 already installed on their home server. Power Pack 3 will automatically install as part of Windows Update if Automatic Updates is enabled on the home server.
As we’ve communicated in a past post, Power Pack 3 improves the Windows Home Server experience with Windows 7 and Windows Media Center by providing new features like: backup and restore of computers running Windows 7, Windows 7 Libraries integration, enhancements for Windows Media Center, and better support for netbook computers. Power Pack 3 will enable the most optimal experience for Windows 7 users on a Windows Home Server network.
“If you've recently upgraded to Windows 7, Windows Home Server Power Pack 3 is an essential download providing enhanced integration between the two platforms and a number of cool new features. Combine library support with enhanced features for Windows Media Center, and we're really starting to see Microsoft bring together the Windows Home Server and Windows 7 client experience so that your media can be stored on your home server and enjoyed seamlessly on TV, PC and Mobile devices with little effort from the user. The bad old days of copy, paste, convert and transcode may well be behind us,” says Microsoft Most Valued Professional (MVP) Terry Walsh of We Got Served.
Microsoft MVP Alex Kuretz of MediaSmartServer.net says “Windows Home Server Power Pack 3 makes storing and accessing your media easier by bringing all the content contained on your Home Server smoothly into your Windows 7 libraries. TV Archive is also a very nice feature that has allowed me to record TV shows and move them to my Home Server to be watched at a later time.”
Here are some details on what’s new:
Windows 7 Libraries integration
When you install the Windows Home Server Connector and log on a computer running Windows 7, you can access the Windows Home Server shared folders from the Windows 7 libraries.
Windows 7 Action Center backup warning suppression
After you install the Windows Home Server Connector to enable the home server backup for your computer running Windows 7, you can suppress the Action Center warning reminding you that Windows Backup has not been set up.
Windows 7 power settings
You can configure your computer running Windows 7 to wake up at a scheduled backup time and then go back to sleep after the backup finishes.
Console support for Windows 7
Windows 7 is properly displayed as the operating system shown in the Computers & Backup tab.
Windows Search
Windows Search 4 is included to improve query search times, indexing times, and reliability. Extended Remote Discovery increases the efficiency of searching across all your libraries running Windows Search 4. Files encrypted with EFS are now supported.
TV archive
Windows Home Server can automatically archive recorded TV by moving your recordings from a Windows Media Center computer to your home server in the format of your choice. This enables playback in the correct format for your home computers and/or portable devices.
Console view
You can view information about your home server’s storage space, hard drives, backup status, and more from Windows Media Center.
Complete details are available in the Power Pack 3 Release Documentation.
We want to thank our community for all of their testing and feedback over these past months with the Power Pack 3 Beta. You validated that Power Pack 3 was ready for release. We like to think that we are building this product together – as a passionate community.
- The Windows Home Server Team