HP MediaSmart Server EX490 Giveaway Winner

Congratulations to Kasey K. of Marshall, Virginia.

He won the HP MediaSmart Server EX490! Check out his winning entry.

When our son was on the way, my wife and I needed a way to be able to print from two different computers (with the printer I already had) and be able to save and access the zillions of photos and hours and hours of HD video we’d inevitably take of our son. Since I’m the only provider of a family with a one-year-old, another on the way, and three pets, I had to find the cheapest solution I could without leaving our old, decrepit desktop computer on all the time (that thing sounds like a helicopter and my wife wouldn’t have it!) The solution that I found is halfway elegant, if not for its drawbacks. It’s a Belkin Network USB Hub. It works by plugging the thing in with an ethernet cord, plugging the USB devices into it, and then installing software on all of the computers on the network so they can “share” the devices. I put “share” in quotes because you can really only use a USB device on one computer at a time (it’s not true sharing.) The software controls which computer can access which device at any given time, and it has a neat “printer” feature that will connect, print, and disconnect when you use the printer.

Now for the drawbacks. First of all, I can’t use the software on one computer to disconnect a device from another so I can use it, so if I left a computer upstairs and want to use the hard drive connected to it, I have to go upstairs and disconnect it. That’s a small problem that I can deal with. The larger problem is the fact that the wonderful software provided with this Network USB Hub is Windows only!!! I’ve been wanting to put Ubuntu on that old decrepit desktop computer for a few years now, but now that 9.10 is out, I’m really itching to get it on there! If I do though, no printer, and no hard drive. I can’t access the Network USB Hub devices from a computer that doesn’t have Windows! Even worse, sometimes the software acts up, so my wife has to call me at work and I have to try to walk her through fixing it (which sometimes is a lost cause due to the fact that I generally have no idea why it failed to do its job.)

If I had an HP MediaSmart Server EX490, I would use it to store all of our photos, videos and music. I would also connect the printer to it so that I could share the photos, videos, music and the printer with all of the other devices on the network. I’d back up all of the data on our laptops, and furthermore, I’d use it to sync address books, contacts, internet favorites, etc. It’d really make our lives easier, since my wife loves to scrapbook and she prints photos regulary from our printer to use in the scrapbook (I wouldn’t have to try to fuddle through fixing it over the phone anymore!) Also, If we had a good way to catalog our videos, she’d certainly post plenty of them online for the extended family to see. As for me, I absolutely love music, and I have a huge library of it just copied over to several of the computers we have so that I can access it anywhere I want. It’s a real hassle making sure all of those libraries are individually updated. A MediaSmart Server would save us a whole lot of time! We’ve needed a solution like this for a while; it’s just way out of our price range, and pretty far down on the priority list. The hardest part about it is that I’m a real geek, and I love technology, and I can never afford any of it. I’m still walking the streets