Digital Home Thoughts: Windows Home Server Power Pack 1 Released

"The team is pleased to announce that Windows Home Server Power Pack 1 has been released to manufacturing (RTM) and is now available on the Microsoft Download Center!... As many know, Power Pack 1 provides a range of new enhancements, including support for home computers running Windows Vista x64 editions, backup of home server Shared Folders, improvements to remote access, more efficient power consumption and improved performance. And, of course, it delivers a fix for the data corruption bug."

After many months, and many betas, the Windows Home Server Power Pack 1 is officially released. The download is live on Windows Download Center and that seems to be the only way to get it right now because when I did a Windows Update on my Windows Home Server it found no updates. I suspect that will change later today though. Power Pack 1 adds a bunch of new features, so if you have a WHS, it's definitely worth getting. I'm going to attempt the manual download and install now - I'll let you know how it goes!

UPDATE: It's impressive how small Microsoft can make updates when they have a known set of parameters to work with. The Power Pack 1 update was a svelte 22.5 MB in size, and the update completed in about two minutes. It seemed like it took longer than normal for my WHS to come back up after the reboot, so I went into my back room to check on it. It has rebooted, but gave me an error message about a missing driver. I clicked OK and left it at the login screen. I should explain that I have a home-built WHS with a monitor and keyboard connected to it, which is a scenario most WHS users won't have. I walked back to my office and my PCs were now able to see the WHS. I noticed a Backup Database Repair wizard, and it found problems with my backups. This has been a persistent problem I've had with my WHS install since I moved from the beta to the final version over a year ago. I've done the manual fix several times, but it never seemed to keep things straight for very long. At the moment I'm letting the Backup Database Repair run, and I'm hoping I don't lose some of my oldest manual backups because I started using WHS to image my machines in clean states instead of Acronis TrueImage (largely because the latter has become somewhat unreliable over the past year).