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Great way to backup for those who don't like to.

Customer Rating:
The unit was simple to setup. Some of the tools installed by HP aren't documented very well but a simple internet search will give you more info than you would ever need. Easy to add extra drives. Easy to manage. For those who are a little more experienced with servers, you can connect your printers to it and share them to every PC connected to the Server, which is great if you own a laptop and like to be wireless. (You have to remote in using the Start>Run>mstsc command on your Windows PC to install printer drivers/software to share them - a little extra experience is needed here, ALSO don't use this command to install a bunch of extra software unless you want your server to run slow or become unstable)

It has a Celeron processor but since you don't sit in front of it running applications you will never notice, it doesn't require too much power to backup files and share printers.

Overall, this is a very simple and reliable way to backup files and entire PCs, which nobody likes to do. It does it automatically while you sleep!

Frustrating experience setting it up

Customer Rating:
It's a good product once you installed the software on your computer(s). Everything seems to work quite naturally.

The problem and frustration? I have 4 computers at home. No problem setting up Windows Home Server on my two Dell laptops (like a breeze), but no luck trying to set up WHS on my HP laptop, even though it belongs to the same brand as the HP EX485 server! I called the tech support at HP perhaps 4 times already. To their credit, the tech support folks are very friendly, and tried their best to help. But after trying every trick they can think of, my HP laptop still cannot install the WHS Connector. And I do mean EVERY TRICK (from disabling/uninstalling firewall/antivirus to modifying NetBIOS to setting up new user account to changing registry). The same non-descriptive error message shows up every time I tried to install the software.

At this point, I don't know if the culprit is the HP home server or the Windows Home Server software (although I suspect the latter more). Either way, the experience has been decidedly mixed. I have never before had problem installing ANY software I want to install.

And by the way, my iMac with OS X 10.4 (Tiger) is not compatible with this server. You need at OS X 10.5 or higher.

Works great, no complaints

Customer Rating:
I've been using this server to back up my digital files for about six months now. (I'm an illustrator/graphic artist and my work files usually get pretty big.) So far, I have no complaints.

works fairly well in a mac/pc environment

Customer Rating:
There has been lot of info from other good reviews so wanted to provide some info that I didn't see.

I have a 8TB system (4 x 2TB) with no modifications and almost no add-ons.

1) first backup on a Mac with ~1TB of data over ethernet took about 18 hours! Initial backups via ethernet only seems like a good idea.
2) noise isn't too bad even in the living room.
3) remote access via Windows Live works fine and is NOT a trial version. Works great.
4) unit is a LOT smaller than I expected.
5) nice feature to be able to turn down the LED's to different levels.
6) replacing the system default drive with the 2TB HDD was very easy. High recommended to do it before starting backups.
7) share folders work well for Macs and PC's.
8) the sleep and wakeup features works well.

The only real negative I have is that there isn't enough help documentation about the right strategies on going about using this system. I got two different books and still trying to understand how to use it as the help files are very rudimentary.

The other caveat is that for a Mac, the TOTAL backup size for ALL your Macs is limited to ONE hard drive size - for my system, it's limited to 2TB. This isn't an issue for me as my Macs total about 1.3TB of data, but can be limiting moving forward. I understand that the newer Mediasmart servers running the newer software (3.0) may resolve this sometime this fall.

Vista seems to spoil everything

Customer Rating:
I've had the home server for about a month. It was extremely easy to setup, in my opinion. I think I might have done one thing differently during setup and that would be to skip updating the software via Windows Update until after all of my PC's were working.

Here's the reason why. My main PC is my XP Media Center 2005. It is a desktop and records all of my TV shows, etc. I set this PC up with the software that comes with the server right away. Did all the updates before using it. No hitches, no errors. Went smoothly and got my first backup that night.

The server was fairly easy to work with. I am a computer guy and don't consider myself a typical user but there didn't seem to be anything that technical about the setup and use. Advanced features such as remote desktop worked easily and right away.

The problem occurred when I went to backup my wife's Vista Premium laptop a couple days after setting up the desktop. I installed the laptop from the CD and updated it with Windows Update. No matter what I have done since, including turning off the firewall, reinstalling the connector and anything that could be related to Home Server, did nothing to fix the issue. I contacted support and got frustrated that they told me to do all of the things that I already have done. I have a XP Home machine and it is working fine. I've got all the functionality I wanted out of it in regards to my XP machines but little in regards to the Vista machine.

I haven't given up on getting the Vista laptop to work but I haven't had that much time and I'm irritated. It feels like a MS error, either with Vista or with WHS but either way I wonder whether or not it would have worked before I did updates to the WHS while I was setting it up.