It would seem that more and more people are interested in purchasing an averagely-priced, media streaming server for their home, which will power their entire home entertainment network and let them access the desired content and information in a fast and easy manner. However, since the pricing of such products is generally pretty high, HP has decided to go for the entry-level market with its upcoming MediaSmart LX195 home server, which will apparently make very good use of Intel's Atom CPU while maintaining pretty much the same level of versatility as some of its predecessors.

So, as Engadget informs us, the MediaSmart server may ditch the hardware configuration it employed up until recently, which was formed out of AMD Sempron and Intel Celeron processors, and adopt one of the best-known low-power CPUs available on the market, namely Intel's Atom running at 1.6 GHz.

However, this is not the only thing HP's engineers have apparently removed from the LX195's configuration, compared to that of similar models. Hence, interior expansion options have been nixed, the server relying solely on a single 640GB HDD for storage purposes, accompanied by four USB ports, which allow users to add some external storage units.

Streaming and connectivity options seem to be the same, the device supporting the UPnP standard, as well as the possibility to connect to a whole range of devices and online services. However, HP does provide an interesting extra in the case of the LX195, namely the fact that the server comes pre-loaded with antivirus software, for protecting it against attacks.

Despite the fact that no definite pricing and availability dates have been provided, rumor has it that we should expect the HP MediaSmart LX195 server to arrive at some point in May 2009 and retail for somewhere in the vicinity of 400 US dollars.


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