The Portable Consultant

The Portable Consultant now finds himself the owner of no less than five Microsoft Windows systems, including two laptops. Even taking into account the eventual conversion of some of the older systems to Linux, there will likely remain three or so.

To make a long story short, I’ve been interested in Windows Home Server since Todd Cochrane of the Geek News Central podcast covered it at a tech conference some time ago.

Being frugal, I wouldn’t consider getting a complete turnkey solution such as the HP MediaSmart Server. I’d rather recycle an old, suitable PC -initially, at least. WHS is said to live happily on a Pentium III, 1 Ghz box and the fact that it can be headless (no monitor, keyboard, or mouse required) is a bonus since my townhouse is short of horizontal surfaces for that sort of thing.

Of course, being frugal, I will be comparing WHS with any open source options but I recalled that the Microsoft product had some efficiencies that might justify the cost and one of these is Single Instance Store which promises to reduce the storage required for the OS since only one instance of any given Windows system file would be stored.

To verify this, I checked with the Microsoft product pages.

You likely know where this is going… I couldn’t find any reference to SIS after ten minutes of browsing and following product page links. I’m sure it’s there, but I couldn’t find it among all the Let’s-not-confuse-the-Simple-Home-User text.

So I tried the Wikipedia entry for WHS… Complete Success!

Wikipedia has a complete, clear (even for the-Simple-Home-User), and concise description of the product complete with links to entries for terms such as SIS itself.

Now, it is likely that Microsoft had a hand in writing and/or editing this entry. No matter. The simple straightforward style got me past all their marketing department’s product jargon to answer the questions I had about the product.

Moral of the story: No online product research is complete without a visit to Wikipedia.

Cheers,
-pmh