The Console is a powerful setup tool, and the various features show considerable promise.

PLUS

• Enormous capacity
• Elegant physical design

MINUS

• Options still somewhat complex
• Some setup issues

The first WHS device available in Canada, Hewlett-Packard's MediaSmart Server is a futuristic-looking, elegantly-designed device. About the same proportions as a desktop PC, but a quarter the size, it's got a slick black finish and lots of glowing blue lights. (They're purple until the unit is configured.)
There are also plenty of jacks for adding extras: four USB ports and one eSATA (external SATA), all of which can be used for adding standard external disk drives. These can be useful for transporting data, or simply for expanding storage capacity still further. WHS adds external drives transparently to its total storage pool.

While the device should work equally well with Windows XP, I opted to test using a nice fresh install of Windows Vista Ultimate. Even before running the installation CD, my first disappointment was that the MediaSmart Server is inaccessible out of the box using standard network procedures. You need a password, and the only way to set one up is by first installing the WHS software.

Unfortunately, that straightforward Wizard-driven installation ran into a showstopper glitch. A program called the Connector would try to find the MediaSmart server and fail; then everything would uninstall and quit.

After a day of head-scratching, and with some very able assistance from two HP support people (who were still getting up to speed themselves), the solution turned out to be trivial: run Windows Update and download a couple of dozen Vista patches. After that, installation completed without a hiccup.

Nonetheless, my faith was shaken. There's simply no reason a network storage device should need an update to the core of Windows. Furthermore, with user-friendliness a particular selling point of WHS, why couldn't the installer alert me that something was out of date? And why wasn't this seemingly vital component included in the WHS install? (Games routinely update Windows DirectX components, for example.)

Once the MediaSmart Server was connected, I was presented with the Windows Home Server Console, a bright, friendly-looking window with multiple tabs across the top, and a small extra pane along the bottom, courtesy of HP, offering brief tips on completing Tasks 1 through 6 of the configuration process.

Unfortunately, the appearance of friendliness belies the huge number of esoteric options in the Console. (One of the simplest is a slider to set the brightness of the status LEDs on the front of the unit.) However, the HP prompts got me through most of it.