If it did nothing but back up home computers regularly, Home Server would be a great thing. But its Connector software also monitors and announces the status of firewalls and antivirus software on each PC it's installed on, and it reports on the quality of your network connectivity. And that's where Home Server begins to make real sense for the average home PC user.

Announcements appear as pop-up messages on each PC running the Connector. I found the pop-up messages telling me "The Den PC's firewall is turned off" a bit annoying since I had turned it off on purpose. On the other hand, that kind of information is good to know.

Another problem that's growing as the use of digital media explodes is being able to access the media from wherever you want to use it. You might have 50GB of music on one computer, 25 full-length movies on another and thousands of digital images on still another. Making any or all of that entertainment available in the living room is likely to dampen anyone's enthusiasm for the evening's entertainment plans. Putting a Home Server in the network where all the digital media can be stored and accessed is a great solution.

I was able to simply copy all my photos, music files and videos from my various computers to the public media folders on the Home Server. From there, any PC in the house is able to access them -- although you can limit which media folders are freely accessible. If you have an Xbox 360 or other Windows Media Connect-enabled device, you can stream audio and video content from the Home Server for live viewing, rather than having to download it first, then play it.

Connecting remotely