Building a Windows Home Server Continued

Right well as you all know I set about the business of building a Windows Home Server from parts I ordered from the frankly great website Ebuyer (and no I’m not being paid to advertise them).
So to that end I’m sure you will all be thrilled to know the parts arrived on time which I was kind of thinking they wouldn’t but they did, and they all worked so no faffing about sending things back.
And surprisingly for someone who has never built a computer before it was all relatively straightforward the only real problem if you can call it a problem was attaching the heat sink to the motherboard and getting it to stay there, turns out it requires quite a bit of force which I was reluctant to use on delicate parts. Now I’m not going to detail the process of putting the computer together there are many websites out there doing that already, Google is your friend there. But what I will say is it all went smoothly.
Installing WHS
This again went without a hitch, I downloaded the trail of the Microsoft website burnt the .ISO file with ImgBurn, bashed it in the DVD drive and installation started. After that was done (and it does take longer than installing XP or Vista) I got myself familiar with the Home Server Console, pretty simple stuff. Installed UTorrent and HFS-a file hosting program and set about well you know, setting it up.
First of all I set a torrent going, pretty smooth there, my router is a bitch and I’ve only ever managed to forward one port so I had to turn off UTorrent on my other pc otherwise it wouldn’t work quite right-that was all fine and dandy,
HFS was another beast. Getting to grips with the actual program itself was pretty straight forward, what was not however was the forwarding of ports so that it can be accessed over the internet, like I said my router is a bitch and after literally hours of trying, I gave up. But what I can say is that a friend has a server set up with this on that works really quite well, here’s a link http://92.19.151.224/
But for me it wasn’t to be, no matter I told myself, the backup features will more than pay for themselves.
WHS backup features were as advertised a breeze to set up, scheduled backups and all that jazz, but what I wanted to do was test the backup function so I bashed the ‘Backup Now’ button and low and behold it started backing up BUT and this is a big but I have about 500GB of data to backup over a network and you know with two different OS’s and what not so I expected it to be quite slow but honestly it was painful and to do this every week or every day? Out of the question it really was the strain it put on my network slowed other things down to a crawl AND to top it off at about 79% it FAILED yes failed, saying that it could not read the source disk. So I was thoroughly pissed off. And decided at that moment that WHS was not for me. (Also the drivers for my MoBo were for XP/Vista and so did not work which meant I could not run UT2004 and run a game server as my graphics were not being recognised)
So long story short I ditched WHS and bashed Windows Vista Ultimate on it, which by the way runs very smoothly. I can now do a manual backup to up still takes ages and frankly is not for me, but now at least I have a useable pc as well.
Oh and even with Vista on it, I decided I did not need a second pc and its now on Ebay, hopefully going to sell, I put it on at the price I paid for the parts and hopefully someone else can make better use of it than me.

Hope I haven’t put you off...lol

-GingerFox