One of the products we're most looking forward to this year, Windows Home Server (WHS), got a step closer to release recently when it entered the release candidate (RC) stage. We're currently installing this on Vitual PC 2007 to see how it looks.

If you want to see how other beta users are getting on, there's now an open Microsoft forum for you to browse through.

WHS is based on Windows Server 2003, and is intended to work as a dedicated home storage server that automatically backs up all your home PCs and allows easy file and media sharing. You can also access it from anywhere via the internet. It's a NAS with knobs on, if you like.

Hardware requirements aren't too onerous, with a minimum spec of a 1GHz Pentium III and 512MB of Ram plus 65GB of hard disk space. Obviously, the more storage you have the better, and one of the good features is that you can keep on adding as many internal or external disks as you wish, since it's not a Raid-based solution. You can set up folder duplication, though, to protect against hard disk failures.

We don't know a firm release date yet, but it's supposed to be sometime during the second half of 2007.