As promised MS has announced Windows 8 Consumer Preview version and many enthusiastic people has already downloaded and playing with it.
There are two download methods available for this product.
1. Windows 8 Consumer Preview Setup:
If you go to http://windows.microsoft.com/en-US/windows-8/download and request for download, you will see a “Windows8-CustomerPreview-setup.exe” downloading. Basically what this does is, it analyzes your system and gives a detailed report about compatibility of your hardware with Windows 8 Customer preview version and also gives you the tools which can use to build media(DVD/Flash disk) from ISO files.
This is a good option for home users who want to upgrade their current PC to windows 8 CP.
2. Windows 8 ISO files Download:
This is for System administrators like me and also for people who want to do the download from one computer and install it on a different one. You can download the ISO files from http://windows.microsoft.com/en-US/windows-8/iso. English, Chinese(simplified), German, Japanese versions are available for download in both x64(64-bit) and x86(32-bit) formats
Well, after choosing your download method, the next step is installation. Like for any other installation, Windows 8 also has it’s own system recommended configuration for giving better performance.
System Requirements
Windows 8 Consumer Preview works great on the same hardware that powers Windows 7:
- Processor: 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 multitouch
- 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 768
Hope this information helps you to get started with this brand new OS.
You can also refer to my previous blog post about problems with installing windows 8 Developer preview in virtual environment. People has made good amount of suggestions in comments sections which you will find useful. You can also go through blog post from Microsoft(http://blogs.msdn.com/b/b8/archive/2012/02/29/running-the-consumer-preview-system-recommendations.aspx) to get more details.
Feel free to raise if you have any questions.