Thanks for the link, I read through it and it looks pretty good. The IT guy at work said its a good program to use and to look into windows media center too. Do you ever use that for streaming to your TV or anything. Most of the video streaming options I'm seeing use DLNA and always have poor quality.
Fuck windows media center. Use freenas or linux.
yeah, for a media server OpenElec is a good choice, Plex is popular too but it requires two servers.
what exactly are you trying to accomplish? If you want to learn about Windows, you can set it up as a domain controller and go from there, but for anything else I'd personally install lunix or bsd, set up ssh and configure it that way.