Microsoft made available its next windows developers preview for developers. It is pre-beta version. The Windows 8 comes with lot of improvements over windows 7 and natively supports all the windows 7 applications. Both 32bit and 64bit ISO images are available for download includes OS, Windows SDK for Metro style apps, Microsoft Visual Studio 11 Express, the Microsoft Expression Blend 5 Developer Preview and 28 Metro style apps.
Some of features windows 8 includes are
- All Windows 7 applications will run on Windows 8
- Logins will use a photo based system
- Refreshed Windows Task Manager suspends apps when they are not running on-screen
- Hyper‑V virtualization software comes pre loaded on Windows 8
- “Reset and Refresh PC” functions enable simplified system wipe and restore
- Multi touch support enabled for IE 10
- Built-in antivirus software will ship in Windows 8
- Metro-style refresh for Mail, Photos, Calendar and People apps with Windows Live ID
- Windows 8 devices equipped with an NFC chip will be able to use a tap-to-share feature to either send data from one device to another, or simply receive data from an NFC equipped card.
- There will not be a different edition of Windows 8 for tablets and probably not for Media Centers either
- ARM devices will be supported, but not in the developer preview
System Requirements
Developer Preview works great on the hardware that powers Windows Vista and Windows 7:
- 1 gigahertz (GHz) or faster 32-bit (x86) or 64-bit (x64) processor
- 1 gigabyte (GB) RAM (32-bit) or 2 GB RAM (64-bit)
- 16 GB available hard disk space (32-bit) or 20 GB (64-bit)
- DirectX 9 graphics device with WDDM 1.0 or higher driver
- Taking advantage of touch input requires a screen that supports multi-touch
