EnergizeIT 2008

It was my first time going to a Microsoft event  and I had no idea what to expect while going there. I reached the Toronto Congress Centre right on the 9 hour mark and I was somewhat surprise to notice in the parking lot the presence of colourful teenagers, some dress strangely to my taste.I asked myself if I had come to right event or did I screw on the date again as is usually my case.It turned out that the Anime North show were being held in a different Hall.

After a quick registration, a bunch of promo materials and a t shirts were given to me, and I proceeded to the main conference hall. Nice set up for a tech event. Dim lighting with the smoke effects, and a round podium. Surprised....at 9.30am sharp the event start and I was still wondering if the speaker was a Microsoft employee or a rock star. Loud music...club light play....an energized audience...no way that was a tech event.The event planner scored a big point there with the big heads from Redmond.

There were some speeches and demo about the latest addition in the Windows LIVE repertoire and it was nicely demo by two rangers dressed employee.The interaction with the audience was appreciated and we later learned that the demo was also part of a competition among Microsoft employees.Some awards were also distributed for the innovation in IT using MS products.I personally liked the one awarded to a developer who created a tool in MRI to help in the early detection of Cancer.The rest of the group winners were from Government of Canada :-).....

After a long speech by a VP from Redmond, there was a presentation competition by MS employees.The second presentation were about developing games and the presentation were quite lame. The last group had a rock star entry. Dressed like hard rockers, the were loud in showing their Guitar Hero talent. The award were finally awarded to the Rangers group I mentioned above. Break for lunch.

Lunch was crude. Burgers!!!!  the ice cream was good though.

The 2nd part of the afternoon was more relaxing and engaging. I decided to be in the PHP with windows sessions but turned out not to be my cup of tea. Embarrassingly I left the room and headed to the Consumers track. There  i was more comfortable with the subjects being talked and happened to be my pet project: WINDOWS HOME SERVER. I had to admit that i felt a little bit proud to know all the topics the MS guy was talking about and also all the answers from the questions from the members of the public.

I decided to stay with that group till the end of the track.

Ok , there has been much bashing about all that comes out from Microsoft, though some critics are valid we will try to stay away from this subject here. I have been a beta tester for Windows Home Server since day 1, and I still remember the excitement at the time coz Microsoft answered my wish . I swear I had no idea at that time that they would be coming up with the Home Server.Now that its out and i have installed it and using it, i must admit, the level of satisfaction I got is way higher that with Vista.My wish at that time was to consolidate all the tons of movies, pictures  and home-made videos into one location and share it with streaming capabilities across the 3 PCs and 1 laptop that I use and also to share some files with friends.Not to mention to have an easy and convenient remote control access over the net instead of using VPN which  a non technical person like me don't like.

I know , you would say why didn't you try NAS.At that time networked Hard Disk (NAS) wasn't easily available and the price was ridiculously high.Though, i got one later( i am not 100% satisfied with it yet). We shall talk about the difference between NAS and NDAS in a later article as i am digressing too much now.

Ok..some people would be prefer to get the OEM pre-built server from the like of HP at Futureshop and BestBuy for $600-800.But as i had spare computers at home, i decided to build a box from scratch and all i can say is that its should be running faster than the OEM ones. I converted an old emachines Athlon 64 3500+ with 2GB Ram + on board memory plus i inserted some Hard Drives( 2x 250GB IDE + 1 500GB SATA). I also inserted a new Gigabit network card( to benefit from my new Dlink DIR 655 router :-)

The system is running like a marvel and now all my PCs are backed up automatically at night, my selected pictures are sync automatically to Flickr and the best of all...drum roll please....I can stream videos, music and work on my files all stored at one location. The Windows Home server has answered all my wish...well except doing the laundry but who knows may be in the future may i can even remotely start the laundry with it...ok ok i am digressing again.

Last note, though the server is supposed to be headless, well as I don't like headless stuffs, I am using a KVM switch to access the server when needs be( rarely as you can do everything from the console on your PC).  So a year after launch, I must say this is one of those few advertise product that is living up to the expectation....