Windows Home Server...a product I love

I have had Windows Home Server up and running....I think for a year....hmmmm it's been a while. The product is the one Microsoft product that just plain works. No bugs. No issues. No crashes. It just works. Everyday it backs up all the computers in the house (except my Macbook Mac OS...because...well it's a Mac...and Windows doesn't like Mac's). In addition to backing up all the computers it allows me to connect to any computer while on the road. I simply use any computer that has Internet Explorer and I can connect to any computer in the house and it's as though I am sitting right in front of it. Windows Home server is also a central location for all of our photos, video and music. I truly love it.

Now with that said, Kelli's laptop is super duper slow. It shouldn't be. It's only a year old. Windows Vista is the issue. I used Windows Easy Transfer to save all of Kelli's documents, settings and such to a simple (30 gigabyte ! ) file just in case the backup process that the Home Server stores is faulty. Then I tried to install Windows XP yesterday....FAIL. I then reinstalled Vista using the HP restore process and it made it like a brand new computer. I ran the Windows Easy Transfer to get all of her settings back. Worked like a charm. The computer was still dog slow.

Today I decided to use the restore feature of Windows Home Server. I put the CD in her laptop and launched the restore program. The most recent full backup was December 7th. I started the recovery. It took about 90 minutes to transfer the 70 gigabytes of data from the server to the hard drive, but it worked fine. Amazing. I am also glad I was able to restore a single partition and not the entire drive. Her computer has two partitions with one being normal "C drive" and the other containing recovery software. I only restored the "C drive". I then removed Norton Anti-virus and installed McAfee. Both were free via our AT&T Uverse. McAfee is less intrusive though. Should help things out.