I’ve just installed the RC2 release of Windows Home Server. It looks pretty good, to be honest. I wasn’t expecting much, but the feature set seems to be rich enough for most users’ purposes. I’ll update this post later when I can tell you how it’s getting along.

**UPDATE**

I’ve just spent a few hours playing with the server software, and it appears to be quite useful.  I popped the client cd into each of my laptops, and within a few minutes, they were backing their data up to the server.  A few hours later, and everything was backed up. 

I also looked at the remote access features (although I have since disabled them – I don’t want to open up a hole in my firewall if I don’t need to).  Setting my router/firewall to UPNP mode, the server was able to auto-configure everything to allow access from the nasty ole web without hitch.  I am sure that there will be many users who will find this feature very useful, but I’m not one of them.  As I said before I don’t want to open up my firewall any more than I have to.

I also took a chance and installed SlimServer on the box.  I doubt it is supported, but it works well enough so I am happy to leave it on there.  It also means I can migrate the music from my existing SlimServer – handy as the old box is about 3MB short of running out of disk space.

That was a very quick spin through the server’s capabilities.  I’ll hopefully get some more time next weekend to play again.  If I find anything I missed, I’ll let you know.