I am a do-it-yourselver (which I hope is a word) and have been for many years now. Because of that I have accomulated mountains of old hardware and systems as I have built out new ones to keep up with my gaming. One of the things I always wanted to do, but didn't have the time/energy for was to put together a home server for the family. I have been taking the lazy route and running portable hard drives between systems or just putting in a quick share between systems in order to get done whatever it was I was working on. Now that I took a few weeks off from work I decided to put in a proper network. I had heard about the new Windows Home Server and a couple good comments on its design and usability, so I decided to go that route.

 Step 1 - getting the software. I figured I would be able to download Home Server from MSDN like the rest of my experiments, but it was not available there. So a quick google turned up the official site. I had to double check the url and make sure it was legitimate. I didn't feel comfortable getting software from a goob like this

and it looked like the company was Stay-at-Home servers. After it checked out and I filed it away as bad design I hunted down the eval copy. Microsoft is giving out "free" 120-day trials on the software, which should be enough time for me decide to either chuck it or keep it.

 I wrote "free" because the Disk is free but you have to pay 10 bucks for Shipping. I couldn't find anyway to download it which was i hoping to do. So I signed up and waited for the disc to arrive. Even with Christmas in the way it got here in just a couple of days, which is great, but I still think they are missing out on wider try-outs if they had put it up as a download. I usually have the attention span of a gnat and I would normally move on and forget it, but I still wanted to give it a shot and setup a proper network.