Newbie needs help on set up

[mjc]

Hi all,

I am new to networking and in particular to NAS.

Me and a friend want to set up a network using 3 PCs and one home server.
Two of the PCs will be at my house along with the home server and my friend will be at his place in another town with his own PC.

Essentially we want to both save and access data on a central server, both will use the two PCs at mine but sometime he wants to access the server and his PC at mine from his house. We are planning to use logmein.com for him to access his PC and the home server.

We have thought about windows home server 2011, as all the PCs we have have xp professional on them and we understand there can be issues with home servers and professional windows OS. However, the number of servers with windows HS 2011 is limited and there are a lot of plain an simple NAS servers out there which are cheap.

Can anyone tell me whether a cheaper NAS system will be suitable for the above scenario?

Any help would be gratly apprecitaed.

We are from the UK by the way if that makes any difference.
Cheers