Windows Home Server Power Pack 3 Goes Live on 24 Mov 2009

Paul Thurrott reports that Windows Home Server Power Pack 3 will be released November 24


"We are announcing that the Windows Home Server Power Pack 3 will be available in all shipping languages (Chinese, English, French, German, Italian, Japanese, and Spanish) on November 24 2009. Power Pack 3 will be a free update to existing Windows Home Server users via Windows Update.

Windows Home Server Power Pack 3 improves the Windows Home Server experience with Windows 7 and Windows Media Center by providing features like backup and restore of computers running Windows 7, Windows 7 Libraries integration, enhancements for Windows Media Center, and better support for netbook computers. Microsoft released the Beta of the Windows Home Server Power Pack 3 in July 2009 and received positive community support and feedback from Beta testers throughout the testing cycle. We let you know back in September that we were going to continue testing the Beta and would not ship the final release of Power Pack 3 until the community has validated our work. We are pleased to now announce the November 24, 2009 availability."

Get your free 120 days Windows Home Server Trial now

Its available even for international order now! Grab it at :
http://www.microsoft.com/windows/products/winfamily/windowshomeserver/countries.mspx

PerfectDisk 2008 for WHS Build 48

I had been trying out both Perfectdisk and Diskeeper some time back on my WHS. So far, Perfectdisk has an edge because it was able to install. Somehow for me, the trial of Diskeeper ends up with :

“Product: Diskeeper 2008 HomeServer — This edition of Diskeeper is not supported on this version of Windows. See the Table of Editions in the Diskeeper Readme.txt file for a list of supported operating systems. Setup will now exit.”

So, I guess I can only try out Perfectdisk for now. Although someone from Diskeeper did leave a comment, I probably check it out later on. Maybe they might be able to help me resolve this issue.

Perfectdisk on the other hand has made an improvement which I only knew 5 minutes ago from their email. The have finally integrated the GUI into Home Server Console. I guess thats a good point to go.

Ok, this is what it looks like when you use your Home Server Console to connect to it. Notice something? Yes, there is a C:\ and a C:\fs\4... Emm, thats must be whats so different for this version of WHS. Well, for me it works so far so good.

But whether does this seriously addresses the 4k cluster issue and VSS, that I need time to confirm. I should note that on a thread I recently read, VSS is not suppose to work on WHS in terms of storing previous versions. However, I am dead sure I had to VSS is enabled on the WHS. Well, maybe I am just confused for now. I will follow on this.

Home Server below $800

How I do it? I will spend the next few entries over the next few days trying to document this. Before I start, I stressed that I had tried with a basic configuration and has opt to upgrade some of the component after testing it for 1 week to improve performance.
Anyway, lets take a look at the stuff I bought first.

Item	Cost
Asus P5KPL-VM Mobo + Intel LGC775 Pentium D E2200 (2.2Ghz)	$275
SIS DDR2-800 1GB RAM	$34
2 x Seagate SATA2 500GB 32MB Cache	2 x $197 = $394
VIOS V9002 Casing + 450W Power	$50

Anyway, this is the first setup. For the setup itself, I will "borrow" a DVDWriter to install Microsoft Home Server. After which, I can keep the DVDWrite in or simple pull it out.