What It Is: The ultimate for-dummies home server that automatically backs up the entire contents—including all your music files—of up to ten PCs. It also lets you share said files across your home network and access them from any Web-connected computer.

Who It’s For: Anyone who lives in a household in which nearly every member downloads and/or rips music, video or takes pictures.

Why It’s Worthy: Unlike servers of yore, the surprisngly sleek and sexy black-and-blue-lit HP MediaSmart uses the new consumer-friendly Windows Home Server platform, which makes setting up as easy as clicking through a bunch of Windows and answering a few questions. Once you’re set up, you just sit back and let the server do the backing-up and updating automatically, so you don’t have to worry about losing everything next time your hard drive fails. Security aside, the best part is the file-sharing, which lets you pull off stunts like setting up a shared iTunes music folder that lets everybody on the network access each other’s music either locally via Wi-Fi or Ethernet, or from any Web-connected computer. If you’ve got a media extender or Xbox 360, you can stream those songs or videos to any TV in the house. Also, you can expand the 500-Gigabyte or 1-Terabyte models up to 6-Terabytes by just connecting more external drives to the USB inputs.

Our Only Complaint: The “for-dummies” set-up only works on Windows-based PCs. If you’ve got a Mac, you’ll have some headache-inducing workarounds to configure.

Cost/Where to Get It: $599 (500-Gigabyte) and $750 (1-Terabyte); hp.com