One of the less obvious facts about the Zune is that as soon as you turn on the device, you have an abundance of quality content of both music and videos preloaded onto the device so you can literally start enjoying the experience from the first hands-on. On the other hand compare that to the “don’t steal music” sticker you have to peel off the iPod - which is like those “shoplifting is an offense” signs, makes you feel pretty guilty even if you have good intentions.

Of course, to enjoy these preloaded content it would have to mean you first have to own a Zune, right? Not quite! You see, Microsoft today has made available the entire preloaded contents pack downloadable (ZIP) from Microsoft’s servers with no strings attached. The reason this has been made available is that “if you have accidentally deleted the preloaded content, you can download it.” But I’d imagine we’re all pretty clumsy.

The ZIP archive comes at a whopping 410MB which contains all of the preloaded content on the 2nd-generation Zunes. Which includes,

Zune, Content Pack, Microsoft, Zune 2