When I first heard about Windows Home Server I fell in love and berated Charlie Kindel (General Manager of WHS) with countless questions on the original Channel 9 thread and after some begging of someone else on the team got let into the beta and eventually into the Insiders Program and I knew well before I ever got my grubby hands on the beta that this was a product I wanted in my house and set a limit as to how much I'd pay, it seems though that the asking price for an OEM copy is higher than I was willing to pay ($150 max shipped) so I guess I'll be going without (unless by some miracle I win something in the Code2Fame Challenge) for the time being.

Being a poor and largely unemployed geek, the box I used for beta testing Windows Home Server was one ugly frankenpc and had planned to upgrade that up to the final release just as soon as I got a copy, despite this though, I still plan on doing more development for Windows Home Server and eventually release a 1.0 version of DHCP4WHS (as well as a couple of other ideas) and likely later improvements so just as soon as the demo comes out I may just relegate it to a virtual PC for testing.

It's probably a good thing considering I have no money and I never really trusted the hardware I was going to throw it on so at this point I've got a couple of options... go strictly VM for a time, try to get a job on the WHS team and help build V2 (and get an employee discount), go without, or pirate it.

Me thinks I'm going to go with #1 and #2 (just as soon as my hands are working).

Funny thing about #2 though... back when this thing first was first announced I'd honestly given serious thought to taking a few days off from work, driving out to Redmond, finding the WHS offices and walk in my knees with my hat in one hand and a resume in the other. That idea was eventually scrapped when it became clear that my hands weren't getting any better.

Read the complete post at http://ihatelinux.blogspot.com/2007/09/windows-home-server-too-rich-for-my.html