Microsoft recently announced ‘Windows 8 Consumer Preview’ and placed beta version of Windows 8 on its official Windows site.
To test a latest OS, users can easily obtain ‘Consumer Preview’ version of Windows 8 from Windows.Microsoft.com.
Steven Sinofsky, chief of Windows department said in release note while announcing the Windows 8 Consumer Preview at MWC tradeshow that “This is a day that’s been long in coming for the Windows team. I just got a picture of the operations center where they’re getting ready for the downloads. They’ve been up since 3 AM.”
However, the company has uploaded ISO image files of the Windows 8 beta version for download, which come in 2.5GB for the 32-bit edition and 3.3GB for the 64-bit edition. The Beta version of new Windows is also offering several languages support like English, German, Chinese, Japanese and French.
In addition, the company also said that “Windows 8 Consumer Preview is ‘prerelease software’”.This indicates that it may be significantly customized before it’s commercially availability and that the company “makes no warranties, express or implied, with respect to the information provided here"
The company also said on its official blog that “Windows 8 Consumer Preview works great on the same hardware that powers Windows 7” so those who are currently using Windows 7 operating system on their desktop or notebook, can easily install it without any difficulty.
According to Microsoft website, the minimum configurations to run Windows 8 Beta are specified below:
• 1 gigahertz (GHz) or faster
• RAM: 1 gigabyte (GB) (32-bit) or 2 GB (64-bit)
• Hard disk space: 16 GB (32-bit) or 20 GB (64-bit)
• Graphics card: Microsoft DirectX 9 graphics device or higher
• To use touch, you need a tablet or monitor that supports multi-touch
• To access Windows Store and to download and run apps, you need an active Internet connection and a screen resolution of at least 1024 x 768
• To snap apps, you need a screen resolution of at least 1366 x 768Microsoft Windows 8 full version is expected to be available by Q2 of 2012.
If you are adventurous and want to give a test to Windows 8 Consumer Preview you can easily download Windows 8 OS ISO from Microsoft.
