[Randall Lind]

A friend of mine son works for Microsoft and he is sending me a copy of Windows home server.

I an a newbie at this stuff. Some one gave me a Tyan S882-D Thunder K8SD Pro server board on ebay I got 2x2.4 dual core Opteron chips w/ 8gb ram. I am building my media server and I will also house backups of my laptop apps.

Any tips on setting WHS up for my media files Movies, TV Shows, Music & Pictures?

Do the following work with it:

utorrent

TheRenamer

Ember Media Manager (I guess I can always run from laptop)

Those are the only 3 programs I use beside Firefox to go to torrent sites.

[jhsrennie]

Home Server is easy to use and reliable. The only point I would make is that you should think about how you're organising the disks. The most common failure on servers (I look after about 300 of them :-) is disks, and unless you use a fault tolerant disk system you'll lose all the data on any failed disk.

From your post I'd guess you're not planning to run XBMC on the Home Server. If you are then you'll need to select a suitable video card.

JR

[Randall Lind]

Does it come with a web browser that allow me to surf to torrent sites to grab torrents? Or do I have to download from Laptop then move them over to the server?

I plan to make folders for Movies , TV shows and Music then play them on my laptop or another computer. I plan to turn folder duplication on but only for folders I want to keep safe Movies, Music and TV shows.

I read it will make 2 partition a 20gb OS drive and a data drive then all new hard drives will be added to the data drive or storage pool as it is called. and that in order to protect lost of data folder duplication must be turn on.

Basically all I want to do is put my files on this XBMC will be on my laptop because it connects directly to my HDTV.

If I have to download files, rename etc then transfer to server I don't mine. However if I can do all that from the server even better.

[remco9999]

I'm using uTorrent and made that run as a service (google on that, plenty sources out there that show you how), then configure the website and/or a dropfolder. You can then use any computer in the house to either drop a torrent file into the drop folder or user the web ui to add torrents.

And I'm running WHS as a server (downstairs) and connect with the xbmc, desktop and a laptop to it. I recently bougth an iPad wich i use to grab torrent lnks from the web and add it through the web ui of uTorrent, live couldn't be easier.

[Randall Lind]

Thanks for all the help I am sure I will have questions when I get the software. I been reading a lot up on it.

[Randall Lind]

WHS does 32bit and 64bit on same disc? Because I fail to mention which version I wanted. If I get 32bit I will need to remove some memory.

[bleze]

Isn't there only a 32 bit version of WHS unless you're talking about Vail

[Randall Lind]

I may not use it since I learn it was 32bit. My server board has 8gb of ram.