Hardware makers get ready for Windows 7

New laptop and desktop designs are on tap as PC and hardware makers start tweaking components to take advantage of improved features in Microsoft's upcoming Windows 7 OS.

Microsoft has announced many improvements with Windows 7, like support for more hardware and touch-screen applications, which hardware makers hope to take advantage of. PC makers like Dell and Fujitsu are redesigning hardware to offer more wireless networking options and touchscreen capabilities, which give users an easier way to input data or move images by simply touching screens.

[ Check your Windows 7 compatibility | Test Center: Windows 7 benchmarks unmasked. ]

Dell on Thursday launched Studio 19, an all-in-one PC with multitouch capabilities where users can simultaneously gesture with two fingers on a screen to zoom, pan, tilt, or rotate elements in photos, edit playlists or browse the Web. The multitouch capabilities give users a more immersible multimedia experience than keyboards or mice would, Dell said.

Studio 19 is an early manifestation of what Dell's future Windows 7 PCs may look like. The PC maker already has touchscreen capabilities with the Latitude XT2 laptop, and a Dell spokeswoman said the company would build in touch capability across its desktops and other laptops over time.

Dell has perhaps been the most vocal in its ongoing efforts to tailor hardware to take advantage of Windows 7 features. Dell officials didn't offer further details on how they plan to further hardware tweaks, but the company sees the OS as a way to rejuvenate the slumping PC industry. Dell saw a drop in desktop shipments, while its laptop shipments were flat during the previous quarter.

Windows 7 will definitely impact the way hardware is designed, and Fujitsu hopes to engineer its hardware to implement the improved wireless communications, security and touch capabilities, said Paul Moore, senior director for mobile product marketing.

The company hopes to build improvements into laptops it sells to vertical markets and customers. Fujitsu has plenty of experience with tablet PCs and the company is definitely thinking about adding touchscreens, Moore said. He didn't provide a timeline on when the company may release touchscreen laptops.

Beyond multitouch screens, Windows 7 will also recognize new hardware and is designed to work better with multicore processors and storage products like solid-state drives, a Microsoft engineer wrote in a January blog entry. For example, it will transfer data to SSDs in larger data blocks, helping sustain high data throughput from storage drives.

With that in mind, companies like HP are working with Microsoft to bring Windows 7 capabilities to their hardware.

"We work very closely with Microsoft ... and being the single largest partner, Microsoft [is] also very dependent on HP, and so before they make any change to their software they work with HP extensively to ensure compatibility with all of our products," said Fred Bullock, vice president of marketing at Hewlett-Packard.