Yesterday, Dell officially announced availability of the Dell Inspiron Zino HD.

The Inspiron Zino HD is a small PC that packs quite a punch in an 8” by 8” square. Hip to be square, right? Ok – enough Huey Lewis, let’s talk about what this PC comes (and can be configured) with:

• It comes with Windows 7 Home Premium 64-bit or Windows 7 Professional 64-bit*.
• You can customize the PC with 7 solid colors.
• You can customize the PC with 3 designs.
• The Inspiron Zino HD uses AMD’s Athlon processor (single or dual core).
• The base configuration is 3GB of RAM, but can be configured with 4, 6, and 8GB of RAM with 8GB being the max.
• Storage shouldn’t be a problem with your choice of 500GB, 640GB, 750GB, or 1TB 7200rpm SATA hard drives.
• You can choose either a DVD +/- RW drive or Blu-ray drive.
• For graphics, you can choose either an integrated ATI Radeon HD3200 or discrete ATI Radeon HD 4330 with 512MB of dedicated memory.
• It has HDMI and VGA ports.
• A 4-in-1 media card reader and integrated gigabit Ethernet are both standard.
• It has integrated 2.1 High Definition audio with the choice of going with a Sound Blaster X-Fi High Definition audio from Creative.
• For your wireless needs, you can choose either a Dell 1397 802.11 b/g wireless card or Dell 1520 802.11 b/g/n wireless card.

This little PC starts at just $229 and can be customized to support a variety of configurations depending on your needs.

Matter a fact, Dell’s Lionel Menchaca talks about a perfect use for the Inspiron Zino HD – a Windows Media Center “hub” with Windows 7. You can connect this PC up to your HDTV via HDMI and play HD Blu-ray movies. You can buy a USB TV tuner to watch and record live TV in Windows Media Center and also stream video content via Internet TV and Netflix.

For a powerful Windows Media Center setup with Windows 7, it is recommended when ordering your Inspiron Zino HD you choose the discrete graphics option (the ATI Radeon HD 4330) for the best experience. With with the storage options you get with the Inspiron Zino HD, you can literally make this PC the centralized “hub” on your network for all your digital media. And of course HomeGroup in Windows 7 makes it easier than ever to share that content with the rest of your PCs on your network too.

In the coming months I’m hoping to pick one of these up and deploy it in my home as my own Windows Media Center hub.

* Base model comes with Windows Vista Home Basic SP1 32-bit.

Photos credit: Dell. See the full set of Inspiron Zino HD photos from Dell’s official Flickr page.

Many of you may be on the market for a new Windows 7 PC. Our partners are delivering new PCs we think you will love and just in time for the holidays! Below are hot and slick looking Windows 7 PCs in categories we think will be big for holiday 2009.

Please note that many of the PCs with features mentioned below are just one of many configurations these PCs come with. Many of these PCs can be configured and customized to your liking.

All-in-one PCs:

• Sony VAIO L Series: Features a Quad Core processor, 24” widescreen touch display, discrete graphics, lots of memory and storage.
• Dell Studio One 19: Features a Quad Core processor, lots of storage, a Blu-ray combo drive and an 18.5" multitouch HD widescreen display.
• HP TouchSmart 300z Series: Features discrete graphics, an optional built-in TV tuner and a 20" multitouch widescreen display.

Ultra-thin PCs:

• Acer Aspire 4810T: Offers a 14" screen, good battery life, and weighs only 2.4 lbs.
• Dell Adamo 13: Features a slick looking aluminum chassis, 13.4" edge-to-edge HD display, ultra-slim .65" profile, Bluetooth and optional Mobile Broadband.
• Toshiba Satellite T135: Features a 13.3" HD widescreen display, full size keyboard, 1.5" profile and weighs 4.7 lbs.

Touch PCs:

• Lenovo ThinkPad T400smt: A lightweight Laptop PC with a 14.1" multitouch display, integrated webcam, and dual-channel digital microphone.
• Toshiba Satellite M500: Features a lightweight, 14.1" touch screen and specializes in mobility. Note that not all M500 models feature Windows Touch however.

Netbook PCs:

• HP Mini 110 by Studio Tord Boontje: Features both style and mobility with its 10.1" HD widescreen – and just 2.35 lbs.
• Toshiba mini NB205: Weighs 3 lbs., has 3G Mobile Broadband and good battery life.
• Lenovo IdeaPad S10-2: Features a multitouch pad, and a 10.1" LED backlit screen.

But wait! There’s more! Here are some other great PCs that really show off some of things customers do on their PCs everyday (yes, some people game every day):

Great Gaming PCs:

• Falcon NW Fragbox: A portable desktop PC with a Quad Core processor, discrete graphics, lots memory and storage.
• Alienware M17x: Features Dual GPUs, a Quad Core processor and 12GB of DDR3 memory (that’s a lot of memory!).
• Asus G51Vx: A 15" gaming laptop PC featuring NVIDIA graphics with dedicated 1GB of memory, and a backlit gaming keyboard.

More Multimedia PCs:

• Dell Studio XPS 16: Features premium ATI graphics, optional Intel Core i7 processor configuration, and your choice of either a 15.6" LED or 16" RGBLED seamless display.
• HP Pavilion dv8t: Features an 18.4" HD widescreen, Blu-ray drive, TV tuner, and premium sound system with subwoofer and Dolby audio.
• Toshiba Satellite A505: Features discrete graphics (certain configurations), a dual-core CPU, and premium surround sound speakers, and a HD 16" screen.
• Lenovo IdeaPad Y650: A very stylish, thin, and light notebook at only 1 inch thick and weighing only 5.6 lbs.

All Around Great Everyday PCs:

• Dell Studio XPS 13: Features a 13.3" edge-to-edge display, backlit keyboard and NVIDIA graphics.
• Toshiba Satellite U500: Versatility, power and style and touch capable. A 13.3” mobile do-it-all machine.

Work from Anywhere (Mobility):

• HP Pavilion dm3: Features a 13.3” ultra wide screen display and NVIDIA graphics, under 4 lbs. and 1 inch thin with great battery life.
• Lenovo ThinkPad X200T: Features a lightweight form factor, Intel Core 2 Duo processor, and is a Tablet PC (great for taking notes during meetings!).

Safeguard Your Work:

• Lenovo ThinkPad X301: Features GPS, Bluetooth and Unified wireless capabilities.
• HP ProBook 5310: Features a 13.3” HD LED display with integrated mobile broadband and a thin and lightweight design.

We are also making it easier for customers to choose which Windows PC is right for them with an updated version of Windows PC Scout (previously known as Windows Laptop Scout).

Windows PC Scout has been completely updated with new PCs and new ways of helping customers better identify the PC they want based on their needs. Essentially Windows PC Scout “Simplifies your search” for the right PC. There are a couple of ways Windows PC Scout will help you find the PC you want:

• Laptop 101: Educates you on Laptop PCs.
• Usage: Discover how certain Laptop PCs are used for specific needs.
• Recommend: Match your needs with quality-checked Laptop PCs by Microsoft. Windows PC Scout provides clear recommendations on Windows PCs at a variety of price points.
• Buy: Once you’ve found a PC, Windows PC Scout makes it easy to click through to purchase the right PC for them through major retailers, the online Microsoft Store or PC manufacturer websites.

If you’re looking for a new Windows 7 PC – give Windows PC Scout a spin!

As you can see, there is such an amazing variety of Windows 7 PCs for you to choose!

Tomorrow’s our big day – Windows 7 officially launches and hits General Availability (or GA as we have acronyms for everything). That means Windows 7 will be available for purchase worldwide! I thought I’d take a moment to highlight some things to look out for as Windows 7 becomes available in stores and online around the world.

We have big events happening in many countries, including: Japan, UK, Germany, France, China and more. Plus we’re hosting a launch party in New York City tomorrow, which will be hosted by our own CEO Steve Ballmer. Even if you’re not in New York, you can still attend online.

Watch the New York City Windows 7 Launch Party LIVE – Starting 8am Pacific / 11am Eastern!

Customer-hosted Windows 7 Launch Parties will also be taking place starting tomorrow. As you know, Microsoft employee Windows 7 launch parties have been happening already. If you don’t live in a country where Launch Parties are available to host, you can hold a Windows 7 Meetup instead! We are providing people with the resources they need to host a Meetup here on Windows.com.

We will be updating our Virtual Press Room on Microsoft PressPass for Windows 7throughout the day tomorrow. You will be able to find all kinds of goodies including the webcast of our New York launch party, video clips and b-roll footage, photos, fact sheets and other materials, and more. If you’re planning to blog about Windows 7 tomorrow, this will be an excellent resource for you!

I’ve got several important (and pretty exciting) blog posts coming tomorrow that you’ll definitely want to read. So be on the lookout for these. And we have quite a few partners lined up doing guest blog posts for the Windows Partner Blog as well! I’m pretty stoked about what we’ve got lined up in terms of blogging for tomorrow.

Tomorrow is shaping up for one exciting day!

Beginning tomorrow, several very cool new offers will start that customers can take advantage of to get Windows 7:

Screaming Deals: We worked together with our partners to introduce a series of limited-time offers with great deals on hardware, software, upgrades, support, and other options. New offers will be released daily and available for the next 7 days on Windows.com (site goes live tomorrow – stay tuned for link!) as well as through participating retail and OEM partners. These “7 Days of Windows 7” offers are available in the U.S. only (other countries have specific deals as well). Tomorrow is Day 1 and those offers will include:

• Best Buy Bundle: HP Laptop, Desktop PC with monitor, Netbook, wireless router and set-up by Geek Squad for $1,199. For the price of one average Mac, you can outfit your entire family with 3 great Windows 7 PCs and a home network!
• Dell: Save more than $100 on a Dell Studio XPS13
• Gateway: All-in-one Acer Gateway ZX6800 23" for $899

Buy a PC - Get a Discounted Upgrade for another PC: Customers who buy a PC with Windows 7 Home Premium, Professional or Ultimate will be able to purchase a discounted copy of Windows 7 Home Premium, Professional, or Ultimate to upgrade an existing Windows PC. For people wanting to add a 2nd or 3rd PC in their home (and take advantage of HomeGroup) this is the perfect deal. This offer will run through January 2nd, 2010 and be available in Germany, UK, Czech Republic, Greece, Slovakia, Poland, Latvia, Hungary, U.S., Canada, Denmark, France, New Zealand, Australia.

Windows 7 Family Pack: The Windows 7 Family Pack is also available today while supplies last. Customers can buy 3 licenses of Windows 7 Home Premium for one low price – for the U.S. it’s available for $149.99. The Windows 7 Family Pack is available in the U.S., Japan, Canada, Germany, UK, France, Netherlands, Switzerland, Austria, Ireland, Luxembourg, Sweden. One of my favorite features in Windows 7 today is HomeGroup. And with the Windows 7 Family Pack, you can truly take advantage of this feature for easy sharing of your music, pictures, video, and document libraries with the Windows 7 PCs in your home, as well as your Xbox 360.

Windows 7 Student Offer: If you are a student (an .edu email address is required), you can upgrade to Windows 7 at the LOWEST PRICE offered, $29.99 in the U.S. This offer runs through January 3rd, 2010 for US, Canada, France, Germany, Korea, Mexico and UK and March 31st, 2010 for Australia.

UPDATE: For more information on the Windows 7 Student Offer, click here.

One more thing… How would you change the world? We have a contest running asking folks to submit an idea they have on how they would use Windows 7 to help their local community. Record a video of yourself explaining your idea and submit it here on the 7 Ways to Change the World website. You have until November 11th to submit your video. The 7 people with the best submissions, as chosen by our judges, will each win a new PC running Windows 7. Each winner's chosen (eligible) community organization will receive a $7,000 grant.

As of today, we’re 9 days away from the worldwide launch of Windows 7. It’s no secret that when Windows 7 becomes available on October 22nd, our hardware partners are launching a host of cool new PCs to match it. I’ve had the privilege to see some of the slick new machines and I can tell you that there are some seriously fast computers with wickedly cool designs on the way.

“But Brandon!” you might be saying. “I don’t want to wait 10 whole days to start shopping for a great PC! Which machines can I check out NOW?”

Well, fear not. There are quite a few powerful, reasonably priced Windows 7 PCs that you can start test-driving now, and a few that you can even pre-order. I’ve highlighted some of my favorites below.

First up is the HP dm3. This 13” bad boy is available with a whopping half-terabyte hard drive, discrete graphics, a built in web cam, and up to a mind-boggling 10 hours of battery life. Sounds expensive, right? The truth is just the opposite; you can get your own starting at $549, which makes it a great option if you’re a student on a budget, or a consumer looking to get a lot of bang for your buck.

On October 5th, Dell opened up a great new program called the Windows 7 Easy Upgrade which will allow you to order once of their select machines today and have it pre-installed with Windows 7 and shipped to you right around the time when Windows 7 launches on October 22nd. One of my favorites and the laptop I am currently using today is the Dell Studio 15. I love this computer because it’s the total package – its great looking and completely customizable. Dell does a GREAT job at letting you personalize the color and design of your machine via their Design Studio. I customized mine with a weird funky goat.

I affectionately refer to this laptop as “The Goat”. I decorated The Goat with a few stickers (as you can see). The Studio 15 has some serious media street cred with a 15.6” HD screen that does 900p resolution, 256MB ATI discrete graphics, webcam and built in DVD burner. It also has a heck of a reasonable price tag, starting at $899. This is a really solid choice if you’re looking for an eye-catching “do-it-all” laptop. I’ll be talking more about this laptop and my experience with it in another blog post coming shortly.

One of my favorite thin-and-light notebooks is the Toshiba Satellite T135. Maybe it should have been codenamed “Pocket Hercules” instead; 3GB of RAM, a new Intel ULV processor, 250GB drive, HDMI and a 720p HD screen, all wrapped up in a package that’s only about an inch thick. It’s a very cool ultra-portable notebook, perfect for working (or playing) on the go.

Is 11” just too big for you? Then check out the HP Mini 110. This 10”, 2.68lb netbook PC is one of the most unique I’ve seen – for this project, HP partnered with designer Tord Boontje to create HP Imprint 3D, a new engraving process that allows HP to build amazing textured casebacks. At $399, it’s an affordable way to get the ultimate in style and portability.

If you need something to put on your desk, instead of carry in your bag, I suggest you take a look at one of the great new all-in-ones. They’re compact and clean, and work great in the kitchen or in an area where you don’t have a lot of space.

The newest kid on the all-in-one block is Sony’s VAIO L. Part HDTV, part PC, the L has a Blu-Ray player, a TV tuner, and a beautiful 24” multi-touch display that’s ready to take advantage of Windows 7 multitouch. The VAIO L is set to hit stores in November, and pricing starts around $1300.

Dell also makes a nice all-in-one in the Dell Studio 19. I love this thing because it’s a powerhouse in a super slim design, and you can get it in white, blue, grey, pink or red. It’s got an Intel Core 2 Quad processor, 3GB of memory, a 500GB drive and all of the trimmings. Like the VAIO L, its ready to take full advantage of Windows 7’s multi-touch technology via its super-bright touchscreen display, and you can get it in “alpine white” for $999. Adding a custom color job and a Blu-Ray drive will bump the price up to about $1100, which is still a great deal.

And HP just announced today revamp of HPs a revamp of their venerable multi-touch enabled TouchSmart PCs. They’re introducing two new models – the TouchSmart 300 (20” HD screen) and 600 (23” HD screen). Not only are these great looking machines with a long, successful history, but they also include HP customized touch versions of popular applications and services, like Twitter, Rhapsody, Hulu, Pandora, Netflix, and more. Pricing starts at a consumer-friendly $899 for the 300 and $1,049 for the 600.

This is just a small sliver of the PC goodness that’s coming soon with Windows 7. Stay tuned for more info on the latest and greatest Windows 7 PCs!

Dell is jumping in to help business (commercial) customers get ready for Windows 7 by offering Windows 7 drivers for their commercial desktop and laptop PCs. They are posting their Windows 7 drivers here (see Drivers and Downloads on left-hand navigation).

By offering drivers for their commercial desktop and laptop PCs, Dell is helping business customers with Dell PCs in their environments prepare for Windows 7 deployments.

For more information, see this blog post on Dell’s Inside Enterprise IT Blog.

If you are looking to waste lots of your time I suggest you try to download drivers from the Dell website.

I had a friend call me today. He just did a format / reinstall on his Dell Inspiron 8600 laptop and needed drivers.

He said that every time he tried to download from Dell, it didn’t work.

Smugly I thought I would have this problem fixed in 5 minutes flat.

2 hours later I still could not understand why every driver I downloaded turned into this:

Let me take that back. I knew exactly why it looked like that – I needed to have the Dell driver download manager installed. But the big question was, where in the hell was it?

I searched for hours, and finally came across an amusing blog post. The short version is Dell is making the driver manager optional.

Here are some of my favorite comments from it:

1. Currently utterly scuppered by Download manager. Just get rid of it. The basket of download links was useful but now Im currently stuck trying to locate the huge number of dell cookies on my system to remove the one thats stopping me from having a choice in a download. Restarting the browser and repicking the drivers is a pain. The job of downloading drivers has gone from a 5 minute task to 60 minute distraction. Where can I send the bill for my time that the clients are not going to pay ?

2. I wanted to download one driver today. In the past, that would have taken less than 5 minutes. Today, because I clicked on the DM link, it took almost four hours to figure out what happened to my system, fix it, and then get the driver.

I suppose Dell has invested too much in this travesty to discard it. Too bad — it would have been better if you used that time and money to improve the ability to diagnose problems and find solutions rather than complicate the process of downloading.

If nothing else, give us the ability to opt out of DM forever. I do not want to keep seeing the dialog box asking how I want to download files. I never want to use DM.

Also, please be kind to those who have not yet used this thing and warn them it is fundamentally different — and make it eash to opt out if the person makes the unfortunate decision to use it.

3. Can anyone explain how to get the option back to download via the web option? After installing and uninstalling the Dell Driver Download software program, I no longer have the option to download via the web either.

So where did I make my mistake? The download manager is optional, but I could never find a link to download it, nor could I find a way of switching back to download without it.

In that same post I found out that the trick was to delete the Dell cookies from my web browser.

Then, I went back to the downloads page and picked the standard option:

Just look at that window for a moment. See how easy it would be to click that first option? If you did, you are now stuck.

How nice.

When I picked the second option I could then download drivers without any issue.

Still I was curious. Did I miss something? Did I blow past a prompt to install a download manager plugin for FireFox? Or was Dell’s website so inept that it had no working download manager for FireFox?

I cleared the cookies, and started a new download.

I chose the Dell Download Manager option.

Same thing as before. No prompts, no FireFox plugin, I was simply directed to the drivers page.

From that point on there was no way to download a driver without:

1. Digging through my cookies

2. Removing the entries for dell.com

3. Choosing the second option when a download started.

What about IE? I fired up IE for the first time in 3 months and went to the Dell website. I picked the Download manager option.

Sure enough it installs an IE plugin (Requires a 53 MB install of .NET 3.5 – Whoo Hooo!)

So. What is the lesson? Make damn sure you pick that second option the next time you are on Dell’s website.

Update: After more digging I discovered that if you install these two updates from MS you can get it to work under FF:

Microsoft .NET 3.5 Service Pack 1

Microsoft .NET Assistant version 1.1

Still. That is a huge amount of crap you need to wade through to just get some drivers.