SlashGear

In a further move to take over not only your study and living room, but generally your home as a whole, Microsoft unveiled the media-excitement that is their Home Server.  An embedded OS with a definite entertainment bias, it’s designed to be both so straightforward to use that your technophobic, button-hashing mother could use it, while also allowing the gadget-freaks among us to tinker away.

A tabbed interface presents simple options with no mention of drive letters, file types or codecs.  Streaming is handled dynamically and becomes a simple matter of switching on wherever you want to watch.  It’s also available outside of the home network, via a portal page secured by the Microsoft Live framework; this not only lets you catch up with photos, music and video, but can also present a virtual desktop of any PC on your network.  Home Server will also take it upon itself to seamlessly back up all your computers, with a proprietary RAID-like array of easily expanded storage.

Reports differ as to whether it’ll be available in software-only and pre-built forms, with Engadget claiming solely the latter while Paul Thurrott states both will be options.  Expect to see it publicly available in the second half of 2007.

Windows Home Server Preview [Paul Thurrott's SuperSite for Windows]