Background:
I've been using Windows Home Server for some years now, and it's a piece
of junk. It's release was incomplete, but eventually they got enough
going for it to work reasonably well, but it had many problems. The
main problem was getting it to talk to the client computers, making it
difficult to set up. Then, once you got it working well, you might
come back in a few months and it wasn't working again. It was generally
a pain to use, but I have to say that, once, it did save me when I was
able to restore my wife's computer to a before-I-screwed-it-up-state. :)
One of the problems was that I was afraid to leave it on 24/7 because I
had no anti-malware software for it.
The last time I updated it, the updates seemed to kill it, at least keep
it from communicating with my other computers. Man, I don't want to go
though all that again!! Fortunately, I'm able to download my photos and
important saved files to a flash key and save them to other computers.
I'm fed up with it, and I'm not going to support it any more.
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
Based on previous experience with WHS, I'm not real keen on getting
involved with the new, dumbed-down WHS 2011, even though it looks good
on paper and has the features that I want. But, I read that it won't
support UEFI motherboards, which is totally unacceptable.
So, now it occurred to me, what about the regular Windows Server? 2011,
2008, whatever. Would it do what I want it to and do it well? What I
want to do is build a server computer that would run all the time, or at
least during the day, and perform incremental daily backups while the
computers were not being used during the day. I would like to be able
to go back to a point in time and reconstruct a computer from scratch to
its state at that point in time. And, I would like to have common
shared data areas that all the clients could access to read and write.
(The old WHS was supposed to be able to do these things, and it
sometimes did, more or less.)
I know that the full Windows Server is probably overkill, but I noticed
on NewEgg that there is a "Microsoft Windows Small Business Server
Essential 2011 - OEM" at
"http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16832416440"
The reviews are mixed, and I'm not real sure it's for me? I'm neither a
networking nor server expert in spite of all the hours I wasted on WHS. :)
Also, will it support UEFI??? My newest mb is UEFI, and I suspect that
all future ones will be. Is there anti-malware software for it?
Dean Kukral
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