Dell Inspiron Zino HD 410 With decent media streamers available for under £150 and many TVs featuring built-in network capabilities, getting content on your telly through a fully-fledged mini desktop PC might seem like a rather expensive way to do things. Still, that hasn’t stopped Dell from refining its Zino mini PC series, with the Zino HD 410 being …
Its not the Hd410, its another model but if its the same build quality I would take issue with your comments, but what I really wanted to say that as a media it would be overkill indeed.
I just order an ac ryan playon mini hd 2, plays everything with facebook, twitter, youtube integration all for €100. I got it to replace my red light of death ps3 which i used 90% for watching films on. But not withstanding many attempts by very talented technicians at work to get it working again it switches off after 10mins.
I think Asus do a little eeebox unit with nVidia Ion technology and an Atom processor. It's likely far better suited to this role - small cramped box, plenty of heat generation (and Paris icon). Also I'd happily forgo an inbuilt dual tv-tuner as a usb one will suffice given an inbuilt will probably not be DVB-T2.
I did not want yet another hot noisy harddrive in the bench under the TV, So I purchased an Apacer AL460. Along with an old usb wlan stick, it streams hd from a local server via a samba-share.
It cost me £45 and is completely silent, small and lukewarm. I'm unable to see any difference between this and the PS3 on playback quality and it plays all format and subtitles I have collected during the years.
I only see the need for a mediapc if you do not have any other pc in the house that can act as a server. I rather spend the money on a vanilla server where you can get 5-6 disk drives. You better soon need the space.
...like concentrating on the HTPC features that this thing is being sold for apparently. That includes MCE, XBMC, Hulu, Netflix and BluRay playback from that drive that was in the demo unit.
This seems like a nice cheap step up from a Boxee box. Although it's hard to tell.
The review was rather incomplete.
It's not clear the overall score was justified (or not).
It might not be a spectacular gaming machine but it at least has a GPU that's likely to be at least supported. This can be a a bit of a problem on low profile integrated boxes such as this.
An HTPC PC that is only sold bundled with Windows - what a waste.
Kind of like buying a car that you can only buy with £150 worth of bricks in the boot. Bricks which are illegal to resell.
Windows has NO place in an HTPC
Also - the CPU is massively overpowered for HTPC use and the GFX card doesn't support VDPAU - FAIL
@DRendar
Windows Media Centre is actually very good as a HTPC.
The UI is done well, all of the TV tuners available work with it, it works extremely well, and there is a healthy collection of useful third-party and enthusiast add-ons and utilities. If you'd bother to take a look, you may be pleasantly surprised.
Of course, if you simply take every chance you can get to rubbish Windows and push Linux, even when inappropriate, then I've just wasted a few minutes of my time.
I'm looking into getting one of these to replace my "Frankenstein" machine which I ended up donating the system board out to a good cause.
Price was one of the factors I was considering, along with the ability to hook it up to a TV out of the box.
It's not that I don't have a decent, wide screen flat panel monitor. I do.
It's not that I don't have a decent, regular desktop style computer desk. I've got that as well.
I wanted something readily portable but not a laptop.
As far as the operating system goes, here are my thoughts:
Box is cheaper than Mac Mini (So, no Mac machine for me, sorry Steve.)
Called with Dell, and tried to get them to forgo the windows tax. They wouldn't budge on it.
Would want to put Windows 7 64 bit on it, but if I couldn't get that, maybe experiment with Windows XP Media Center instead.
I could put Linux on it, but this machine will be replacing the only computing gaming machine at home.
I'm sorry, but I have to disagree. A few month ago I have been able to power up one of those Zinos on my TV-set. It came fresh out of the box, booted, and greeted me with a desktop with a thick black border. It took me half an hour of browsing through various menus to find the setting to turn that off.
It seems like the software on the box assumed I misconfigured my television to zoom in onto the picture and tries to compensate that by scaling down the original picture and adding a black border. That's just sick! Doesn't anybody even try out that design before getting it produced?
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