MS Windows Home Server

Business Opportunities with WHS Web Seminar

Microsoft’s Partner Program have a free 1 hour web seminar on business opportunities with Windows Home Server.

The live event has been updated with Power Pack 2 content will be presented by Small Business Server MVP Kevin Royalty and WHS MVP Grey Lancaster. Fellow WHS MVPs will also be on hand to answer any questions

The event will take place on June 05 at 09.00 Pacific (17:00 GMT), so make sure you register, which can be done here.

KeepVault for WHS – Win 100GB Account

For those of you keeping up with our KeepVault for Windows Home Server giveaway, today we have a 100GB account up for grabs to one lucky person. And since its a biggie we are keeping the competition open until tomorrow (30th May).

KeepVault for WHS provides provides an online backup solution for our Home Servers.

Current statistics show that one in every ten hard drives fail each year. The cost of recovering a failed hard drive can exceed $7,500, and success is never guaranteed.

To help safeguard us from all eventualities, the new version 3.0 provides the following features:

• Backup to local drive for an extra layer of protection
• Status via SMS, Email, Twitter
• Faster File Uploads (up to 30% faster than version 2)
• Schedulable backups for any time of the day
• Maximum file size 20GB
• Real Time File Monitoring
• Compression for faster uploads
• Bandwidth limiter
• 128-bit encryption for your protection
• Backup any file, not just shares
• Manage online backups
• Single-file restore
• All-file restore
• Real time status indicators
• Local Event log for easy software diagnosis
• Free Support

So to get your hands on this 100GB account we just want you to tell us approximately how many (average) mp3 songs could you fit into a 100GB account. Leave your answers in a comment below before 23:59 GMT (15:59 Pacific Time) tomorrow, Saturday 30 May 2009 – All winners will be announced and notified on Sunday 31st May 2009.

NOTE: WE have determined the approx. number of mp3 songs which could fit into 100GB and the nearest answer will win the prize.

Win KeepVault for WHS – Day 4

God forbid this ever happens:

You return home from a revitalizing vacation to find your once pristine home not sparkling in the sunshine’s rays due to the white emulsion on the exterior walls but instead as you approach in your 4 by 4 you see instead the once large windows broken and the white walls now black instead and the air smells of burnt barbecues. It’s then it dawns on you that there has been a fire and as your car finally comes to rest outside the drive. The house is totally burned and home is no longer home.

In this scenario it doesn’t matter how good Windows Home Server is, even with data redundancy switched on as the Home Server machine is a blackened shell and your data gone, for good!

Or is it?

One way to protect yourself against a scenario like this is to also back up WHS to the cloud, so a copy of your data is somewhere else in case a situation strikes due to fire, flood or any other trauma.

And that’s where KeepVault for Windows Home Server comes in protecting your photos and music amongst your collection of data, and whatever else you store on your Home Server.

Welcome to day 4 of our mega KeepVault for Windows Home Server giveaway and today and to have a chance of winning today’s 40GB  account just leave a comment to this post before midnight tonight (GMT)* explaining a scenario where KeepVault would save the day. Hopefully your story telling is better than mine above.

*Today’s entry must be in before 23:59 GMT (15:59 Pacific Time) today, 28 May 2009 – All winners will be announced and notified on Sunday 31st May 2009.

NetBooks Can See WHS

If you own one of the small 8 to 10 inch netbbooks and install the connector software on it, you properly would notice that the WHS Console drops off the edge of your screen as the console is too big for these small screens –

But not no more, as Microsoft have just released a fix to correct the problem. For those of you with a screen resolution smaller than 1024 x 768, after this update is installed the 1024 x 600 resolution is also supported which is the resolution many netbooks use.

The update will be downloaded automatically via Windows/Microsoft Update to Home Server or you can click Update Now on the Settings tab of the Windows Home Server Console.

More information is available in Knowledge Base: 963032.

HP MediaSmart Server LX195 Wins a Recommended Award

Website HotHardware has a review of the HP MediaSmart Server LX195.

The 7 page review looks at the specs, the design and the build quality. The reviewer then takes us through the setup and configuration and tells us about the features of the LX195. As well as this, performance against a number of NAS devices is tested.

HotHardware had this to say:

Of all the consumer-level NAS devices we’ve looked at recently, the LX195 is (so far) the undisputed performance leader. This is in no small part attributable to the device’s Atom processor and 1GB of RAM–essentially, the LX195 is a small, headless PC–it has the same approximate horsepower as a netbook or nettop PC

We also connected the LX195 to a power meter to get a sense of how much power it consumes. When the device is sitting idle, it uses between 27 and 30-watts of power. Even when under load, its power consumption appears to top out at around 30-watts. When in standby mode, the device sips only about 3 to 4 watts of power.

You can read the full review here.