Home Server?

So I have a bit of a dilemma: how do I get my pictures and videos shared around the various media consumers in the house? Currently I have 3 computers (work, mine, Stephanie's) and then there's the XBox 360. I have all of this stuff sitting on a ½ TB external hard drive. I had, at one time, a Windows Server 2003 machine that sat in my living room and was connected to the network. That went ok for a while, but for some reason I decided to get rid of it. Probably because I was thinking about ripping DVDs and streaming them to the TV. More on that later.

Anyway, so I then put my gaming PC up here, but it is rather large, and grossly conspicuous, akin to a Honda Civic with neon lights, purple-sparkled paint, a 3-wing spoiler and a loud obnoxious exhaust system. Except that the PC is black and doesn't have a spoiler, otherwise they are about the same. Alas, she was too big for the living room and actually too loud -- for some reason I'm a fan freak, so the PC has 4 fans in it -- and thus was removed to my office for more cave-like gaming.

As of now, I think I have abandoned the streaming ripped DVDs idea -- I ripped a few but never did anything with them, so that tells me I need to remove that from my list of requirements. I procured a laptop that is relatively new and it is currently hidden in the living room with the ½ TB drive hanging off of it. This particular laptop was defunct but with a new hard drive it's functioning perfectly. Now there's the whole business of sharing the media... for some reason Steph has problems maintaining a mapped drive (she's running Vista) to the shared drive on the media server laptop. I sometimes have problems with it as well. It's running XP Pro, and should be doing just fine... perhaps I just haven't spent enough time getting it set up properly.

I also need to get JungleDisk running on it again to use for my off-site backups. Oh, and before you ask, yes, I really need to keep this on it a Windows machine. Using the Xbox 360 as a media extender is really pretty smooth - more so that I would've thought, as it does pictures, video and music. Except it doesn't play AVI files captured from my Canon cameras... a bit of a bummer there.

My next idea was to try out Windows Home Server. There's a free trial DVD on its way to me as we speak and that could be interesting.

Any other ideas?

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