Weekends are for fun and relaxation. As I was pulling up some music to listen to via my Xbox 360 last Saturday morning, it occurred to me that I've been running Windows Home Server for quite awhile now. In fact, last Saturday was the 100th day I'd had Home Server running on my home network. So I thought I'd share some of the ups and downs I've had over that time with Home Server.

What I Dig

Hardware Requirements: I have a decent PC that I build about four years ago in my home office. By "decent" I mean that it is adequate for accessing and storing data, being a print server and some gaming. Very solids, but nothing spectacular, but let's face it, it's freaking four years old.

The basic specs are:

• P4 2.4 GHz
• 512 MB SD RAM
• Basic, non-brand name 64MB display card

I had a 20 GB hard drive already installed serving as the system partition and I bought and installed a 220 GB ATA drive (yeah, the system board is too old for SATA) for content. And that's it. Pretty basic.

The OS absolutely screams on this hardware. As it is mainly managing content and backups on your home network, Home Server doesn't need a lot of horsepower to provide reasonable performance. I know that several PC vendors are selling preconfigured machines for Home Server, which is cool, but you can just as easily build yourself a machine for very little money and get comparable performance. Just be sure to get yourself a big and fast drive for storing content. Disc space is cheap and you'll be glad you have the extra room once you start doing backups of the other machines on your network.

Reliability: Home Server just runs and runs and runs. I've only had to shut it down a couple of times and that was because I was heading out of town for a week or so with the family and I usually power everything down if it's not going to be used for an extended period of time. As it's built on top of Windows 2003 Server, the reliability isn't surprising, but welcome just the same.

Remote Management Console: Home Server comes with a client-side application that does a few things. For one, it registers your machine with the Home Server automatically, facilitating automated back-ups primarily. It also provides you with a handy management console application that will let you manage the machines on your home network, configure automated back-ups, setup and manage user accounts on the Home Server, configure shared directories for music, videos, etc. and check the current status of your server drives and your network as a whole.

While those of us who work with servers all the time could do this any number of ways. One of the risks of creating a home server is that non-technical consumers who still struggle to print Word 2007 documents with the new tool ribbon will be completely lost when it comes to server configuration. The Home Server management console makes this very easy and, for those of us who could manage it from the command line, it provides a very efficient means of making necessary changes and then getting out, all without having to log directly into the console. Nice!

What's more, you can configure Home Server to be accessible from outside your home network as well, providing you with access to your files and data ever when you're away from home. Nice nice!

What I Don't Dig So Much

No Support Media Center Extender: This just made me sad. As Media Center ships standard with Vista Home and up now, it seems like bundling some flavor of the Media Center management interface into Home Server would have been a no-brainer. But alas, it is no where to be found. It is easy enough to connect my Xbox to the shared content directories on the Home Server, but I have really come to like the Media Center user interface as it appears in Vista. It was so simple, my six-year-old could cycle through available movies and pick something out. Now I have to do it for her because the files names can be a little cryptic to someone her age.

I guess I'm not looking for full-blown Media Center on Home Server, just the ability for other Media Center PCs and devices to interact with it like Media Center. Is that so much to ask? Honestly, this is my only complaint, but it's a significant one.

Better Off Than a Hundred Days Ago?

My hope when I installed Home Server was that I would get all the benefits I'd come to enjoy from Media Center with the added bonuses of network and backup management in Home Server. As it turns out, the latter set of features are what I've benefited from the most. What would make Home Server a grand slam instead of a double would be to provide me with the means of not only storing my media files, but to manage and access them much the way Media Center does. If this were there, I'd be hard pressed to think of anything else you'd have to do to this product to make it better.