During winter break, right after Christmas, I picked up a HP Media Smart Windows Home Server -- it was the demonstration unit from the local Office Depot. I've always found, and this was no exception, that you can snag a really good deal that way.
I love it! I have had some issues with it, nothing major, in fact it was the Seagate hard drive that was the problem, but I"ve finally used all the features.
It was super easy to set up, basically plug and play. I've got mine set up to backup every computer that is on at night. I also save quite a few files on the server itself, anything I'd like to get to in the house that I don't have on WIndows Live Mesh.
I even had hard drive that came with it fail -- it was a Seagate, and it did several hours on the phone to get it replaed and get the server working but they were very helpful. It was a known issue and the drive was back the next day. One thing that did help was already having extra drives.
Putting extra drives in couldn't be easier, you don't even have to power the server off, just slide the drive tray out, put the drive in and slid it in. By the way SATA is so much better tha the old IDE drives, and they were bad.
I finally did a restore last night -- I decided to try WIndows 7 on my Gateway M75 computer and while the tablet features worked none of the drivers did and none of the hardware is being supported. Restore was a bit scary since it was the first time, but once I found the Network Card driver and put it on a flash drive, it was a piece of cake.
LOVE WHS!
Hi,
I have windwos 7 Ultimate in my connector machine and I just bought my HP smart home server ex490 2 days ago
I have been trying to do a restore folowing al this steps http://www.mediasmarthome.com/article/10014/How-To-Restore-the-HP-MediaSmart-Server/
and I can't get it to work, after I run the restore DVD wizard it fails in step 3 of 4
Any idea?
Will this be related to windows 7
Posted by: cga | November 25, 2009 at 04:44 AM