The booklet I read to research this post was Windows 8: What to Expect by Michel Martin which is excellent & which was free on Kindle. It's only a short but I think it's well worth downloading. There's a website where you can download a beta version of Windows 8 as an ISO image. If you do a search on google you should find it. It works on any machine that currently runs Vista or Windows 7. I think Microsoft have learnt that if they enable it to run on as many machines as possible they will sell more. In addition it runs on tablet pc's with an ARM processor. The 32 bit version requires a 16GB hard drive & the 64 bit version requires a minimum of 20GB. You can run from an USB drive of the same values as the hard drives but you may find you need to go into the BIOS & enable boot from USB device. If you choose to install it on a hard drive you need the Windows 7 Installation Tool. Alternatively you can convert the ISO image & copy it onto a DVD. Note it needs 8GB of space.
In Windows 8 they have done away with the start button & instead you have the metro which is quite a few big buttons in the centre of the screen that you click according to what you want to do. Among them is an XBox Live button & it's rumoured that the retail version of Windows 8 will play XBox games. There's also improved integration with the major social networking sites. The idea being that you almost use it like email & regularly stay in touch with your friends. To start a program you type the 1st couple of letters of its name & the corresponding ones appear so you can select one. You will be able to connect 3G devices without a driver to your PC. It will have support for USB 3.0. If you have several hard drives it will automatically merge them into 1 volume like Home Servers but if you prefer you can use your hard drives as if you have RAID which means it will do mirror copies. y Finally you will be able to install software straight from an ISO image.
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