In a bid to get new customers onto its forthcoming Windows 8 operating system, Microsoft has made a 90-day trial version of Windows 8 available for download for developers and IT professionals. The 90 days is to get devs to use and evaluate the OS, which is now in its final build and nearly ready to ship.
The download is for Windows 8 Enterprise edition and comes in Chinese (Simplified), Chinese (Traditional), English, English (UK), French, German, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese (Brazil), and Spanish and is available in both 32-bit and 64-bit versions.
Microsoft has laid out some terms though, as they state that after the 90-days are up you must reinstall your former operating system or purchase and run a fully licensed version of Windows 8 upon its release on October the 26th to the general public. Plus, the big M states that you cannot upgrade to the full version from inside this 90-day trial… only when your trial is up.
The minimum specs for the Windows 8 Enterprise edition trial are a 1GHz processor, 1GB of RAM for a 32-bit machine or 2GB of RAM for the 64-bit plus a graphics card that supports Microsoft’s DirectX 9 graphics with WDDM driver and 20GB of hard disk space free.
Microsoft advises that that if you fail to activate the trial software within 10 days of installing it, your PC will start to slow down and have issues and they actually recommend that developers install the trial edition in a virtual environment or on a separate hard drive or partition.
“If you fail to activate this evaluation within the 10-day grace period, or if your evaluation period expires, the desktop background will turn black, you will see a persistent desktop notification indicating that the system is not genuine, and the PC will shut down every hour losing unsaved work,” the company says.
Developers can download the trial version now here http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/evalcenter/jj554510.aspx
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