I'm sure the profile of my family is very similar to other these days...especially if one of the parents works at a technology company. My husband has a laptop...it's a bit old, but functional. We recently purchased a desktop with a flat screen monitor that we call the "family computer" but it's really turning out to be the kid's computer. We have another laptop that is the fallback if one kid is using the "family" computer, my husband's on his and the other kid wants to use the computer. I of course have my work laptop that I carry back and forth between home and work, but the "merry-go-round" effect only happens on the other three computeres. Mine is mine. :-)

 That said...our 11 year old is really into producing things. She loves to record video clips and use Movie Maker or even PPT to mess around with making small videos. She also likes writing short stories that she'll just start up whenever the mood strikes her. The problem...she has "projects" started on the "family" computer, my husband's laptop and the "fallback" computer simply based on who's turn it was for what computer. The problem is obvious...she often forgets what computer she was on when she started Project X and if she does remember, she can rarely track down the file because the folder names, etc., may be different from computer to computer. Sometimes her stories are for school so that's when the real noise usually starts.

Our younger daughter has similar issues...just different types of projects. And if we need to find digital photos we've copied down from the camera it's just short of a needle in the haystack to track anything down. Granted, we could create more organization around how we file things and keep track of what computer they're on. We could save music and videos in a certain way on a certain computer and store pictures one just one computer so we aren't hopping from computer to computer to track them down.

 Or...we could use something like Windows Home Server! Charlie Kindel blogged about it when it was announced on Sunday. From the explanation about it may sound like we could maybe just peal ourselves away from the computer for a while and enjoy life. Well...we are more balanced than it may come across. But, with how prevelant computers are in our kid's world these days and with nearly all of out interactions with the bank, service providers, etc. happening online, and digital movies and pictures being commonplace...this is such a cool option. I look forward to jumping onboard...and learning more from the community during the beta Kevin Beares will be running (more info will be available on his blog).  

 Cheers to the Home Server team!