Windows Home Server & the Acer AspireOne
February 8, 2010 Windows Home Server
…and people laughed when I said I was going to put Windows Home Server on my Acer AspireOne. Well, lo and behold, here it is! Windows Home Server is a lot lighter on resources than Windows 7, and it consumes a lot less electrical power, too.
What’s really interesting about Windows Home Server is just how easy it is to configure. I’ve spent a lot of time working with other versions of Windows Server, including the ancient NT 3.51, but none have been so easy to administrate as this. Less than an hour after converting the installation DVD to flash and installing it on the netbook, the system was ready for it’s first external hard drive … a 1TB Seagate.
Now, however, comes the arduous process of moving 14+ Terabytes of information from my Ubuntu server to Windows Home Server … without buying any new hardware. Suffice to say, patience is definately a virtue here.
I’ll be sure to write some updates in the future talking about how to install Windows Home Server on a netbook, and some of the pros and cons of doing so. The only thing I’m not looking forward to is retiring my old Ubuntu server. It’s been running on my trusty HP notebook for years without much trouble … but that HP has a foot and a half in the grave, and all the replacement parts are in Texas and cost more than the machine is worth.
Do you run Windows Home Server? Are you thinking about it? I’d love to know what you think of the over-simplified server OS.
Comments (2)
Hey there, just wondering if you have the howto of getting WHS installed on a netbook. I copied the media to a bootable USB stick, it goes through ahd partitions the drives, then reboots.
Starts loading drivers and stuff, then blue screens wont go any further….
any advise? its a HP mini 2100 I think
I didn’t have this problem when I was installing the OS on the netbook, but I have heard of this problem happening when using some of the “borrowed” copies of WHS found online.
One solution that I would suggest is making sure that the USB stick is formatted as NTFS (FAT32 will not boot properly), and that you’re using a legit version of Windows Home Server. If you can’t get a legit version (due to regional or financial resitrictions), then you might have more luck using one of the “untouched MSDN” releases found around the web.
One word of warning, though: because this is supposed to be for a server, you don’t want to install an OS full of viruses or exploits. Who knows what kind of evil things people will do to WHS before making it available online