Over a year ago I asked who would buy Microsoft’s Windows Home Server. I thought I’d buy one of hp’s MediaSmart Server EX470 as soon as it was released, but I ended up waiting a little while before taking the plunge.

Back in May of this year when I saw it on sale at Newegg, I placed my order and have been using it to protect my PCs ever since. Every night the two desktops and the notebook are automatically backed up. Not just a data backup; an image of the hard drives are taken. In the case of a hard drive failure or some other disaster, the included PC restore disc is supposed to make it easy to pull an image off the server and restore the machine to an earlier point. I got to test this out for the first time tonight.

When Nadia was off at a conference, she accidentally installed the invasive malware program AntiSpywareCheck onto the notebook. Do some searches on removing that app - you will find that there are a few files to remove, a DLL to unregister, and a ton of registry entries to remove. I went through them, one-by-one, and couldn’t find any of the things these guides pointed me to. Yet there in the system tray sat the annoying icon telling me to buy and install the full AntiSpywareCheck product.

After wasting my time with those guides and writing the ASC people a mean e-mail, I turned to my Home Server. If I couldn’t remove this thing, then I’d just roll back to a point before it was installed. That PC restore disc I mentioned earlier couldn’t have made it easier. It took about 60 minutes to fully restore the notebook, which is less time than I spent trying to remove the malware.

There are plenty of other things WHS can do, which I’ll go into in later posts.