Windows Home Server's Limitations

By and large, Windows Home Server (WHS) can do anything you would expect a server to do, and much more. But there are a few shortcomings that you should understand before you knock yourself silly trying to accomplish the impossible:

• Windows Home Server supports only ten users (plus the Guest account). You can have ten different user names on your network — and that's all she wrote. If you need to allow more than ten people to use your network, they'll have to start sharing user names.

• Windows Home Server supports only ten PCs on the network. Perhaps surprisingly, you can put two WHS servers on the same network, and you can even stick a WHS server on a Small Business Server network. But you can't have more than ten PCs connected simultaneously to a single WHS server.

• You can't use a laptop as a Windows Home Server. That's a real pity because a laptop with a dead screen would be an ideal candidate for a server.

• Only NTFS-formatted drives get backed up. Chances are good that all your network's hard drives use the newer NTFS file system instead of the old Windows 98-and-earlier FAT. Windows Home Server won't even try to back up a non-NTFS drive, so if you have a USB "thumb" drive that's formatted with FAT, it won't make the cut. You have to format your thumb drive with NTFS first. (For details, consult your thumb drive manufacturer's Web site.)

• Windows Home Server won't back up laptops running on battery power. Backups can draw a lot of power, and the last thing you need is to have your laptop's battery die in the middle of a backup.

• WHS won't give the full health report on a computer running Windows XP. When WHS reports on computers attached to the network, it shows only the backup status of Windows XP machines; it doesn't show the status of updates or other indicators from the Windows Security Center. By contrast, Windows Vista machines report whether the firewall is enabled, whether the antivirus software is up to date and working, and whether Windows Update is set to update Windows automatically.

• Remote access to a computer doesn't work with certain versions of Windows. If you want to run WHS's Remote Access to reach into your network from the Internet and run one of the computers on your home (or small office) network, the computer that's being summoned — the one that acts like a puppet while you pull the strings from afar — must be running Windows XP Professional, Windows Vista Ultimate, Vista Business, or Vista Enterprise. Alas, XP Home, Vista Home Basic, and Vista Home Premium aren't sufficiently endowed.

Windows Home Server does support "previous versions," but the feature doesn't work the way you think it does. The previous-version snapshots get taken twice a day, on a fixed schedule. They only cover files on the server — there's no independent "previous versions" support for files on the rest of the network's PCs. Retrieving the previous versions of files on the server is easy with Vista Business, Enterprise, or Ultimate — or, for that matter, with Windows XP. Paradoxically, it's considerably more difficult with Vista Home Basic or Premium.