, however, due to the weak economy, competition with less-expensive Network Attached Storage (NAS) products and Web-based storage services, and even Home Server's Windows-centricity.

While Home Server can store Mac files, it cannot be used to do full back-ups and restores of crashed Macs -- as it can for PCs running Windows XP, Vista, and, soon, Windows 7.

That lack of full Mac support limits the usefulness of Home Server, especially for early adopters who are likely to run a combination of Windows, Mac and Linux machines at home.

"Have we looked at [adding full Mac backup and monitoring]? Sure," Windows Home Server product manager Steven Leonard told recently. "But we think that there is a lot more work to be done for the Windows platform. That's the path we're going down."

Hewlett-Packard Co.'s latest MediaSmart home servers, which run a tweaked version of the Home Server operating system, through their Time Machine software, but they