There are a lot of good reasons to buy Windows Home Server for your home - and I expect to see it in many small businesses that want a secure place for shared files but don't need the full Small Business Server suite.

"Network attached storage" became affordable recently, so I got a Buffalo Terastation that attaches to the network with a Cat6 cable. Four hard drives in a RAID 5 array for security, 750Gb of storage space, in a box that looks a little like a miniature safe - a round dial on the front and marvelous flashing lights.

I bit the bullet on Verizon's $60/month EVDO broadband service for a built-in card. I almost never try to connect to an 802.11 wireless network any more - it's easier to connect through the Verizon service.

Windows XP Media Center Edition has a terrible interface for music files, so I had to rig up an easy way to switch back and forth to J River Media Center. And Microsoft didn't let its software play many common formats for video - it's only beginning to open up support for XVID/DIVX and a couple of others. I spent more time than was reasonable to get the right cables and make the picture fit the not-quite-high-definition monitor.

There are new high-end media computers from Niveus and others now that look better, but they easily go up north of three thousand dollars. Microsoft is hoping people will use Vista's Media Center interface to run their TV, movies, music and photos, and use an XBox 360 in the living room to display everything. Seems unlikely to me.

The Logitech Harmony 880 remote control is the crucial piece that makes the whole thing work. It's expensive but essential if you're drowning in remotes.

Epson's Stylus R300 inkjet printer has the invaluable tray for printing directly onto printable CDs and DVDs, and does high quality photo prints. Some of the more recent Epson models have not been as satisfying, though - noisy, large, and thirsty for ink. Be careful!

I use a card reader to transfer photos to the computer, instead of hooking up the camera directly - in my experience, that's faster and more reliable than installing proprietary software from the camera manufacturer. The Panasonic is recognized by the computer without any extra software, but transfers are glacially slow.

The high-speed memory cards used by the Panasonic camera can't be read by the card reader built into the Dell computer, so I bought a cute little Kingston MobileLite card reader that can deal with all sizes and speeds of SD cards.

Comcast charges a lot for "business-class" service, but I've got the static IP I wanted for my mail server and speeds are really satisfying - Comcast guarantees 8Mb download/1Mb upload speeds, but they use some nifty technology called "PowerBoost" to greatly increase speed for the first 30 seconds or so of downloads, making it look like the connection is even faster.

Email is changing fast! Small Business Server makes my Outlook folders available anywhere (multiple PCs, handheld, online), but it means I have to maintain my own server. Businesses will increasingly be looking at hosted Exchange services, and individuals have way too many choices. Google and Yahoo mail are quite nice onscreen but don't integrate with Windows programs very well; Hotmail can integrate with Outlook but it's tricky to set up; hosted Exchange mailboxes are available but fairly mysterious for most people.

For businesses running an Exchange Server, Exchange Defender is cheap and absolutely invaluable for filtering spam and virus-laden messages. It's been a completely successful rollout to my SBS clients.

I have Windows Live Messenger running all the time but rarely use it. I just hate the cute icons and flashing ads and extra windows that open by default and the little sounds and nudges and all the rest. It's hard for me to fit instant messages into my work routine - a message rarely arrives at a good time to start an open-ended conversation.

Skype offers amazingly good phone call quality over a decent Internet connection. I paid twenty-five bucks to be able to make unlimited phone calls to any number in the US - as long as I'm sitting at my computer. Sadly, I'm always sitting at my computer.

At different times I've looked into Flickr and Picasa and some of the other photo sharing sites; they're just great but simplicity should lead us all to pick one or two services and stick with them.

I've got many domains registered with 1and1.com, one of the largest web hosting companies in the world, which has dirt-cheap rates and good online control panels. Support is hit or miss, like most big companies.

The news page is built on Blogger.com, but I can't begin using any of Blogger's cool new features without changing the way the page looks and losing the consistency with the rest of the bruceb.com site. Fortunately, Microsoft Live Write works with Blogger, making it much easier to format a news post and add pictures.

I hope Tumblr.com has a business plan to make money - I love its ability to create links quickly to odd things that I discover online. (Here's my Tumblr page.)

Foldershare syncs folders on multiple computers, Windows & Mac - no limit on file size, up to 10 "libraries" of 10,000 files, but syncing only happens when the computers sharing folders are online simultaneously. I've used it extensively for the last few years but it's not integrated with the Windows Live ID system and it looks a lot like Live Mesh will make it irrelevant.

Live Mesh includes online storage of synced files, so changes are synced up every time any computer in the "mesh" is turned on. Currently there's a storage limit of 5Gb and only Windows XP and Vista computers are supported, but the platform is intended for many more devices and more functions.

Windows Live SkyDrive is online storage of up to 5Gb of any kind of files - no syncing, so files are only available from the SkyDrive web site, but easy to use and easy to share.

Office Live Workspace also provides online storage of files, limited to Office files, integrated with Office so files can be opened directly from Word or Excel.

Add Acrobat.com, Google Docs, and the smaller players, and one of our hard problems will be remembering where our documents are stored - far worse than just remembering what we named a folder.

Bloglines has been invaluable for reading RSS feeds. It's an online service that can be accessed from any browser and its mobile page displays beautifully on a PDA.

LogMeIn Rescue is the (expensive) service that allows me to provide remote support. It changed my business dramatically. If you're looking for remote access to a home or office computer LogMeIn Pro works like a charm.

Not to be overlooked - the New York Times Reader is a program for subscribers that updates itself online but then can be used offline. Sections and articles are presented in a beautiful format with no scrolling. It makes me think that perhaps the newspaper industry has a future.

Quickbooks 2008 and Quicken 2008 are well behaved and mature and useful and quirky and infuriating, just like always. I've got Quicken going online to our banks to download transactions and pay bills. At one time I set up Quickbooks to go online with the bank also and found it slow going - unintuitive setup and a really annoying process to reconcile the bank accounts. Plus I got snarled in a web of bank charges, as if Wells Fargo had never dealt with anyone before using both programs. Now I just sigh and manually create duplicate entries in the Quickbooks check register.

Adobe Acrobat 8 Professional is essential. I'm going through the same conversion happening in many offices - I'm starting to create PDFs more often than I send jobs to the printer.

Good old obsolete FrontPage 2003 keeps bruceb.com running. HTML - can you believe it? How quaint!

Microsoft Digital Image Suite Anniversary Edition is now discontinued but I haven't found a good substitute - good at greeting cards and similar projects, a great collection of clip art, and - well, it's just easier and more familiar than Photoshop Elements for simple editing.

Windows Live Photo Gallery is what I recommend for most people looking for simplicity. I'd use it if I were starting from scratch.

GForce is an inexpensive addin for J River Media Center and other music programs, to create gorgeous displays while the music is playing. Everything else is drab by comparison.

Pieces of Nero 8 Ultra Edition are installed but the only parts I use are Nero Burning ROM to burn data CDs and Nero Recode, to copy and convert movies. Using it with commercial DVDs requires AnyDVD to be running in the background.

Adobe Premiere Elements 4 is installed but I rarely open it - working with video requires a commitment of huge amounts of time!

Cyberlink PowerDVD is still my favorite program for watching DVDs. Most people are perfectly happy with whatever came with their computer, of course.

Backups are handled in several ways. (As it happens, I don't use OneCare for backups - but that's sufficient for most home users and many very small businesses!)

StorageCraft ShadowProtect runs on the server, making hourly images of the partition with the server operating system and our data files (including family photos).

SyncToy is run manually once a week or so to make a duplicate copy of the music library onto an external hard drive.

FolderShare makes a duplicate copy of stored movies and DVDs onto the living room media PC.

And once every couple of months, I update a copy of the image of my Vista computer onto another external hard drive, using Vista's Complete PC Backup And Restore.

Windows Search 4.0 is completely essential.

ComputerTime 3.0 is running on all the computers in the house, limiting the time that the kids are allowed to use their computers. The new version allows me to control the time from my computer, no matter which one they're using. Power!

Ilium Software eWallet is a nice little app for storing passwords - I use it frequently. You have some organized way to handle your passwords, right?

A handful of others are there if needed - WinRAR for opening RAR files and ISO files; DVD Audio Ripper 4 for getting the audio from concert movies; QuickPar for fixing broken newsgroup downloads. I've tried a couple of different programs for torrents - currently using uTorrent - but they wind up overwhelming my router and slowing my Internet connection until I power-cycle everything with blinking lights. Weird. Easier not to download torrents.