More than 1m downloads of Windows 8 Consumer Preview


2 Mar 2012

The Windows 8 Consumer Preview has been downloaded 1m times one day after Microsoft released the preview.

Microsoft announced the news on Twitter that the Windows 8 Consumer Preview has been downloaded 1m times.

The company released the consumer preview of the next version of its OS Windows 8 earlier this week at an event in Barcelona. It allows users to test out Windows 8 for themselves.

Before this, Microsoft released a developer preview, which experienced 3m downloads.

Windows 8 boasts an ambitious redesign of the Windows platform, aimed for use on PCs and tablets with live tile icons, touch-first browsing and full-screen apps.

The consumer preview introduces the beta of the Windows Store, which offers apps for the platform from Microsoft and third-party developers. It includes cloud connectivity across Windows PCs and Windows Phone devices. It also gives a preview of Internet Explorer 10.

Microsoft recommends that in order to run Windows 8, PCs should have a 1GHz or faster processor, 1GB of RAM (32-bit) or 2GB of RAM (64-bit), 16GB of hard disk space (32-bit) or 20GB (64-bit) and DirectX 9 graphics with WDDM 1.0 or higher driver.

The Windows 8 Consumer Preview is available to download now globally.