Things to know about the Windows Home Server Power Pack 3 Beta

So the Windows Home Server Power Pack 3 Beta has been publicly available now for a few days, and we have been seeing queries on the PP3 forum and also to us here at the site and so I thought I would throw up a quick post with some things to know and be aware of with PP3 to hopefully save people some time and pain!

1. Read the documentation that comes with the beta! I know that most of us don’t bother to read documentation, but in this case you really should as the process for installation is different that usual and there are some important notes (which I will cover here as well!)
2. You install the PP3 beta by running the Install.cmd file and not the pp3 exe.
3. The console will still claim to be Power Pack 2 – this is expected.
4. All of the version numbers should say 2061 EXCEPT Drive Extender which should still say 2030.
5. There are problems installing the Windows Media Center Connector on machines running Windows 7 that are later than the 7100 RC build.
6. On Windows Vista, both the tv archive and the console view appear on the Windows Media Center “main menu” under Home Server where as on Windows 7 RC only tv archive appears there, console view is under Extras.
7. 
8. If you experience what you think is a bug, please log the bug on Microsoft Connect. The whole point of the public beta is to get as much feedback as possible and to correct everything as quickly as possible – that only works if you do your part 🙂
9. Windows 7 backups – the blog post Microsoft put out seems to have confused some people. There isn’t a new Windows 7 backup feature in PP3, what is there is integration with the Windows 7 Action Center to stop Windows 7 from telling you that there is not backup facility available (when you know there is).

If you find anything else you think worth mentioning, leave a comment.

And enjoy testing Power Pack 3.