Fri, Sep 7, 2007 | Terry Walsh
Over at HP’s NYC launch website, amongst all of the hyperbole around their new product lines for 2008, they dropped in an image of the HP MediaSmart Server’s new Control Center - basically a new front-end that pretty much acts like your Shared Folders server directory, albeit with extra links to HP Photo Webshare software, help files and configuration settings.
Terry Walsh - who has written 644 posts on We Got Served - The Windows Home Server Site.
Hi - I'm Terry and I'm the Owner of We Got Served. The site's been covering everything to do with Windows Home Server since February 2007.
I live in Silverstone, UK with my wife and when I'm not working on We Got Served, I have a career as an Innovation Consultant to contend with.
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September 8th, 2007 at 1:36 am
Given HP’s poor aptitude for writing good software (see “HP Director” printer software for an example), I doubt their additions to the WHS interface will be anything but trouble. Boo.
September 8th, 2007 at 7:30 pm
I agree with Sean. Haven’t seen them cook up any decent software yet either. I’ll just be going for the straight out of the box version by Microsoft and add just what I want to add to it.
September 9th, 2007 at 11:18 pm
I also hope the add-ins are a bit slicker than previous attempts. I put the HP iTunes add-in on MCE2005 many moons ago as it looked like the answer to all my media centre music woes (iTunes & Media Player kept screwing up each others library settings) and it was an absolute dog, totally unusable with more than a few hundred songs in the library.
September 10th, 2007 at 10:52 am
Agreed
Their hardware is great, software sucks. Im looking forward to the HP home server, but wondering if i can blow it away and do a clean windows only install on it.
Not sure how that will work given the whole headless server thing??
September 10th, 2007 at 11:25 am
Interesting points you’ve all made - having owned quite a few HP printers, and currently running a HP machine as my main desktop (not home server) I agree with you all. HP have never covered themselves with glory when it comes to quality drivers and bundled software - let’s hope that their relationship with the MS WHS team over the past few months has changed things for the better.
Jason - reinstalling a vanilla flavour of WHS sounds like an interesting project. I can’t see why it wouldn’t work, unless HP are using some proprietary drivers for their components….
Terry
September 12th, 2007 at 3:58 pm
I’ll be interested to hear how you’ll be installing a clean WHS onto the HP box when it’s headless.
Also, by doing that you lose LED management of the box. From what’s been shown of the HP additions, they don’t look to be too pervasive, and shouldn’t inhibit basic WHS functionality.
March 29th, 2008 at 10:40 pm
Well, i love my windows home server. Only been using it for around 3 days now, and its fab! A++++++++++++++++