What's more, many users have enough difficulty finding the time to manage their own computer -- updating antivirus software, configuring the firewall and keeping downloaded files in order -- that they pay little or no attention to the other PCs in the house. And that means few of them get backed up regularly, if at all.

Enter (WHS), announced at this year's Consumer Electronics Show in January. WHS is a platform for storing, sharing and protecting data from multiple home PCs. Additionally, it can stream media, provide remote access and monitor PCs on a home network. The basic concept is simple and logical, and any household with more than one PC already wants one...though they may not know it yet.

The WHS software itself will not be sold as a retail product but will be available to consumers later this year in the form of hardware appliances such as Hewlett-Packard's MediaSmart Server, also announced at CES. Selling this product as an appliance only is in some significant ways a great idea, though final pricing will be the determining factor in purchase decisions for many people.

Making the product an appliance means that the server is a plug-and-play device. Buyers can open the box, plug it into a power outlet and a wired Ethernet connection, and turn it on. The unit boots and runs without a monitor or keyboard and can be managed from any PC on the network -- any PC, that is, running either Windows XP or Vista.

Since Windows Home Server is currently , it isn't available in appliance form yet, but approved beta testers can download and install the software on any PC that meets fairly basic system requirements. My test system had a 1.7GHz AMD processor with 512MB of memory, a DVD drive and two ATA hard drives: one 60GB and one 120GB.