Wow!  Those prices seem pretty reasonable.
I was part of the beta for WHS and I had no complaints at all.  Easy to set up and use.

I plan on pushing this to everyone I know.  No one I know (outside of communities like this) back up data in any kind of organized way.  The media and other file sharing, and remote access may be the door that opens the door to responsible back-ups.

• WHS features
• FAQ

Okay, nice story with some good info.

But I get really get confused when looking at anything other than my desktop computer.

Who or what type of people will find this interesting. The single computer home user (like me), someone who has a home network setup or are we only talking business people or corporations here? What situations would make this worthwhile to purchase?

The OS shown looks more like XP than Vista, is that correct?   

EDIT: Of course I was slow typing. Thanks for the links Zubaz.

Philly (and anyone else), the market for this is multiple PC home users. 

It discovers all networked PCs, backs up all of them (a la system restore), allows for restore of individual files, shares all media (unless flagged not to share by admin), allows remote access to the server from the internet, streams media to Xboxes.

The server itself doesn't need a keyboard or mouse.  After install all management is done from console on the local PCs.  So you can turn it on and stick the server in the closet.  Then you install the console on your other PCs and go through the wizard to identify what feature you *don''t* want it to implement.

WHS is based on Windows 2003 Server, so yeah it has more in common with XP than Vista.

While this isn't 100% fire-and-forget for users, it's pretty darn simple.  If the product takes off, I wouldn't be surprised if in the future there was a 1-step config for a WHS box.  Plug the box into the network, turn it on, run an installer on your PC and *boom* it's all auto-detected and setup.  No harder than installing a printer probably.

Personally, while the price on the HP is very attractive, I'd probably prefer to just buy a stand-alone copy of WHS and another hard drive and slap it into a spare PC.  But for those who don't want to bother with that hassle, the HP prices are impressive.

Zoomba and Zubaz always seen to have the answers, or atleast the answers to the right questions.   

Thanks very much.

(I'm going to go stand in the corner now, I was a bad boy. We have 3 desktops and one laptop and no network running).   

Wow. C'mon Philly - time to move out of the dark ages! What's the point of having multiple computers in your house if they can't communicate?

As was I [A participant in the beta] ... and I completely agree with Zubaz.

I know I'll be using it at home for all my backup/sharing/remote access needs.

Microsoft is on the ball with this one ....and their prices are very reasonable.  

 

I have old windows computers that I use for these functions, as well as 500 gb external USB2 drives (now down to $150) for automatic backups.

But I would think this could be interesting if it breaks the arbitrary 10 connections shares limit of XP. If it doesn't, there's nothing here of interest to me.