What OS for a home server? (other than linux)

[tehkiwi]

I'm wondering what operating system I should use for a home server/media center.

I don't know if this sounds like a silly question but I'm confused. should I use vista64? should I put win7 on it? What about WHS Or Windows Server?

I can't really find a straight answer on what WHS offers against w7.

And I would rather stay away from linux as I am lazy and dont really want to learn to configure and troubleshoot everything myself.

What are the feelings on what works better as both a media center and a local file dump?

[Steve R Jones]

It depends - what do you the server to do and for how many people/computers etc?!?!?!

The one MAIN thing that WHS will do that the others won't-> it will automatically clone ALL of the computers in the house...and ever so often it will update the image. If a pc goes down - you pop in a new hard drive - boot off the special boot cd - it connects to the WHS machine and starts the rebuild process.