The latest download for Windows 8 Release Preview features hundreds of visible and tens of thousands of under-the-hood changes from it's previous public release.

Almost three months after the "Windows 8 Consumer Preview" public download milestone, Microsoft Windows 8 Release Preview is now available officially for download. Windows 8 Release Preview is a pre-release testing version of Microsoft's upcoming major OS upgrade "Windows 8", the new OS is designed ground-up in terms of interface and focuses on people and apps providing them powerful new ways to use social technologies and to connect with people.

Don't forget to checkout the official release introduction video below.

Despite the drastically new Metro UI, Windows 8 has enjoyed mostly good reviews so far. But the latest revelation by Microsoft is not everybody would be happy about, the company has announced it's plans to do-away with natively bundled free DVD playback capability in Windows 8. The decision has been taken citing the sharp decline in usage of this media and the added licensing costs related to DVD playback, however, there would be an paid Media Center upgrade available for users willing to get the DVD playback support natively.

Microsoft has finally unveiled public download links to the much awaited Windows 8 Consumer Preview build. Now available both as automated web-installer and full ISO disc images in various languages with accompanying genuine Windows 8 activation serial product keys, the direct download links and introduction video are posted after the jump.

Judging from all the comments received on our new Windows 8 logo post, it's pretty clear users are not particularly happy with the design (at-least majority of them). The new logo and a few of the reasons behind the design have been posted up on video and this might give a different perspective on the new look, video's after the jump.

Microsoft drastically changed the user-interface in Windows Phone 7 and their upcoming desktop/tablet OS update Windows 8 to "Metro UI", the same design philosopy has made the company change the age-old "Windows OS" logo to a brand new look for "Windows 8".

Microsoft has been planning to ship an free built-in anti-malware solution with Windows 8, and it seems we already have the product up for selected few users under beta-testing phase.

Microsoft® Security Essentials Beta provides users an fully functional antimalware application featuring regularly updated anti-malware database files for complete protection from viruses, spyware, and other types of malicious software's. More details and screen-shots after the jump.

In some good news for consumers and bad news for security software vendors, Microsoft will be shipping an built-in anti-virus feature to their existing "Security Essentials" program in Windows 8. Microsoft already provides a free anti-virus solution since past couple of years, in the form of Microsoft Security Essentials - but as a separate do

The Windows 8 team is working to do something rare in operating system development, maintain the same system requirements as the prior generation. In this case the Windows 8 group is designing the next version of Windows to operate on the same hardware as Windows 7, which itself was less demanding than the real requirements of Windows Vista. In other words, the user should be able to adequately run Windows 8 with a 1 gigahertz processor and 1 gigabyte of RAM for a 32-bit version and 2 gigabytes for the 64-bit version.

The reason for this change of engineering attitude is the proliferation of mobile devices; laptops and tablets. Also, from a corporate standpoint if you are running fleets of computers running for the most part twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week even marginal savings per machine can add up across the enterprise. Microsoft Program manager Bill Karagoumis indicates in a blog posting that managing memory is the key to the team’s efforts.

Reducing the memory footprint is not usually the first thing that comes to mind as a way to reduce energy costs, particularly when you are expanding the feature set of the operating system. The Windows 8 team is doing this in a variety of ways. One, is change Windows services from an “always on” to a start on demand or even a manual startup. Like not leaving ones car idling while parked saves on petrol, these changes to how the operating system services are invoked saves on the amount of system memory is in use at any given time. This leaves more memory available for multitasking and other operations.

A second technique is what is described as memory combining, the consolidation of duplicate memory blocks into a single copy. Duplication of data occurs when a program anticipates that certain data will be required and that data is initialized and allocated. Even if the data is never actually used, it remains cluttering up memory like several copies of the same book on a bookshelf. Memory combining by the Windows 8 operating system can free anywhere from tens to hundreds of megabytes of RAM according to Mr. Karagoumis.

Whether it's the official Windows 8 download links, officially slip-streamed Windows 7 SP1, or creating bootable rescue disks, .ISO disc image files are very handy to use specially for downloading full CD/DVD images from internet. Users had to depend upon third-party applications in previous version of Windows to mount or burn these disc images, but not anymore as Microsoft's upcoming Windows 8 operating-system comes with built-in support for mounting and burning .ISO and VHD files.