Vista - Announcing Windows Home Server RC!

Announcing Windows Home Server RC!


We have arrived at another major milestone, Windows Home Server Release Candidate. You can get the RC at the following link:- http://connect.microsoft.com/Windows...wnloadID=6920).


The RC (Release Candidate) release is a feature complete build of Windows Home Server.

Here are the details:

Install options

As we stated in a mail earlier in May, we are only supporting one installation option with this RC release: New Installation. Server Reinstallation is not supported. Server Reinstallation will be supported from RC to RTM.

The New Installation option will wipe out all drives including drives where your backups and shares reside. Please be sure to backup any critical data off of your Windows Home Server installations prior to installing the RC build.


Enable Customer Feedback

We ask that you enable providing customer feedback information to Microsoft when you go through setup (or enable it later in Server Settings). We received VERY valuable data from Beta 2 and CTP via this mechanism and it is extremely important that any crash or failure you encounter get reported to us. For privacy reasons we cannot enable this feature by default now that we are this far along in our release schedule.

Things we want you to test:

•Run every app you can think of on your client machines accessing files on the server via SMB.
• Copy stuff on, copy stuff off, delete stuff, move stuff.
• Run lots of backups.
• Do single file/folder restores.
• Restore full PCs.
• Remote Access configuration
• Password policy
• Password reset
• OOBE from a home PC (the OEM experience)
• Full system restore of a home PC (test on a spare box)
• Adding and removing hard drives through the Windows Home Server Console


Again, we thank you for all the great testing and feedback you've given us so far, and look forward to you helping us insure this RC is really ready for release!

Thanks,
Kevin Beares
Windows Home Server Community Lead