Forum Spotlight

Long time forum member VieuxJules has posted in the forums with his experience installing the new Windows Server 2012 Essentials beta on his HP MediaSmart Server EX470. Note that he has an upgraded server, most importantly increasing the stock 512MB of RAM to 2GB. While he installed it on the EX470, this process should work […]

New forum member “Phil2011″ has posted in the forums with his solution for automatically ripping his DVD and CD collection directly on his Home Server using only freely available tools. Here’s what Phil2011 has to say about his process: I recently got quite tired of the manual overhead I had to go through to rip […]

Hard Drive Sentinel is a popular application here at MediaSmartServer.net, with it’s extensive list of features and ability to get SMART data from many different storage controllers that often aren’t supported by WMI. You can read a good overview and see some screenshots in this forum post. Forum member “UberDave” recently found a Windows desktop […]

The following is a guest article by forum member “msawyer91″ aka Matt Sawyer, who is passionate about Windows Home Server and also the developer of the popular Home Server SMART Add-In. There has been a fair amount of activity in the forums here, and on other Windows Home Server sites, that talk about Advanced Format […]

Brand new forum member “Edge” joined up just to share with us his HP MediaSmart Server EX470 and the massive media collection he has stored on it. The server has 4 internal hard drives, 4 drives in a Sans Digital TR4M-B connected via eSATA, and 12 more drives in Sans Digital TR4U-B USB enclosures all […]

The following is a guest article contributed by forum member (and one of my former HP co-workers) “Pete”. Thanks to Pete for sharing his setup of the HP LX195 as a MythTV Personal Video Recorder Before I get into the details of my wicked LX195 setup, I feel like I should make a statement. My […]

The CPU heat sink used in the MediaSmart Server is custom designed with a special hole pattern that does not allow it to be replaced with commercially available parts. It is also a passive design, relying on air movement from the two 80mm server case fans to provide cooling. In practice this works fairly well, […]

The long awaited HP 3.0 upgrade for the EX47x and EX48x has now made its way to the proud and loyal MediaSmart Server users.  We’ve been reading in the forums about the many different experiences members have had with the upgrade process, and thought we’d compile your stories, the successes, the problems and solutions within […]

Forum member “ymboc” has long been a great technical contributor in the MediaSmartServer.net forums. First he uncovered the layout of the MediaSmart Server debug port, then figured out how to modify the BIOS of the EX470 and EX475 to use an AMD X2 processor, next he documented the registry keys that manage the fan speed […]

Forum member “crzyhomer″ has uncovered a little known fact with Windows Media Connect in that you can only have 10 “Allowed” devices. His issue manifested itself when adding a new Playstation 3 to the network and he received a “Media Server Error: DLNA Protocol Error 501″. To see how many devices your server has registered […]