An add-in for those of us that like saving power (which we should all be). PowerSwitch ads a tab in the settings dialog which enables you to set a power down state to wake up and to sleep your home server and which method to use, either shutdown or hibernate if supported.
More info is available here.
Terry Walsh from WeGotServed talks about the data corruption bug that has hit Windows Home Server and points out how to avoid it over on The Media Center Show Podcast.
Available here.
The defragmentation tool PerfectDisk 2008 has been updated to build 43. The following features and fixes are for all versions of PerfectDisk 2008. eg Professional, Server, WHS etc:
Existing users can update from within the program interface and new users can download an evaluation copy and get more information from here.
UPDATE: Build 43/Service Pack 1 of PerfectDisk 2008 has been temporarily pulled. You will not see this if you try to update now. A new build and service pack will be coming shortly.
Deploying the FREE windows utility PDFCreator on Windows Home Server will enable you to Print to PDF and save paper. The confessions of a freeware junkie blog has the details on how to set it up.
http://maximillianx.blogspot.com/2008/02/network-admin-tip-create-shared-pdf.html
ComputerWorld writer Gregg Keizer has been speaking to the WHS team about the corruption bug. Todd Headrick, the product planning manager for WHS had this to say in the article:
In many cases, users might not realize that they are, in fact, “editing” a file, because an application may be appending metadata to a file’s contents. He cited the example of digital music files, such as those played by Windows Media Player 11, one of the programs on the reported-but-not-confirmed list. When you’re downloading album art, your actually changing the file, he said. If you rate a song, you’re actually editing the file.
Remember although it is a big issue this problem does not affect a lot of users and Microsoft are working on this full time and are expanding the scope of their testing.
Read the full article here.
A book which is currently available but is not specifically just for Windows Home Server users is the Big Book of Windows Hacks by Preston Gralla which gives you everything you need to get the most out of your Windows Vista or XP system, including its related applications and the hardware it runs or connects to. This book takes you beyond the operating system with hacks for applications like Internet Explorer 7 and Office 2007, and hardware such as the Zune, your networking gear, and the PC itself including specific hacks for Windows Home Server including Make a Remote Connection to Windows Home Server Over the Internet which we have managed to get an excerpt for you in PDF format.
http://cachefly.oreilly.com/make/hacks/excerpts/BigBookOfWindowsHacks/BigBookOfWindowsHacks-129.pdf
The Big Book of Windows Hacks is available now and is published by O’Reilly.
Mary Jo Foley has some interesting info on her blog that the next major version of Windows Home Server will be codenamed “Vail” and will also include more entertainment “capabilities”, whatever that means?
http://blogs.zdnet.com/microsoft/?p=1217
What was going on this week at mswhs.com? Here’s your chance to catch-up if you missed something!
Congrats to Brendan Grant from the blog I Hate Linux which we have mentioned a few times here at mswhs.com. He joins the Windows Home Server team from March 24th in Redmond as a Software Development Engineer.
Microsoft employee Steve Lindsay passion in his spare time is Media Center and Home Server, so it makes sense that Steve is about to go into beta with a MCE Home Server Manager application, which does the following:
This is good news as the current manual way of doing this takes some time and configuration. Once the beta is available Steve will make it known on his blog which is available here and here.
Steve is also interviewed this week on The Media Center Show Podcast about his home Media Center setup and the custom developments he has been working on.
