CodeName: MidOrI

Posted by : Unknown Thursday, October 6, 2011

While Microsoft is making Windows 8 available to the public, there are a few caveats to keep in mind. This build (8102) is a pre-beta, which is why it would be premature for us to run any benchmarks on it. Microsoft is trying to highlight functionality as opposed to performance.

If you have hardware that can run Windows 7, you can run the preview version of Windows 8. Fair warning, though. There’s a decent chance that these requirements will change once Windows 8 goes gold.

Windows 8 Preview: System Requirements

1 GHz or faster 32-bit (x86) or 64-bit (x64) processor
1 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
To run Metro-style Apps, you need a screen resolution of 1024 X 768 or greater

There are three developer builds available at Microsoft’s website. Everything is x86-based, so if you were looking to root and experiment with an ARM-oriented version of Windows 8, you’re out of luck. That’s slated for a much later date

Versions available for download

Windows Developer Preview with developer tools , 64-bit (x64)
SHA-1 hash - 6FE9352FB59F6D0789AF35D1001BD4E4E81E42AF (4.8 GB)

Windows Developer Preview English, 64-bit (x64)
SHA-1 hash – 79DBF235FD49F5C1C8F8C04E24BDE6E1D04DA1E9 (3.6 GB)

Windows Developer Preview English, 32-bit (x86)
SHA-1 hash - 4E0698BBABE01ED27582C9FC16AD21C4422913CC (2.8 GB)

The 64-bit build with developer tools includes the following: