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.

While Windows Phone 7 is not as popular as iOS or Google Android, the mobile-operating-system is gaining numbers every day and have been receiving rare praises from it's users thanks to the tile based "Metro User Interface". Citing the popularity Microsoft is betting high on the new "Metro UI" and will also feature same in it's upcoming Windows 8 Desktop OS, to provide other mobile-OS users a hands-on experience to the metro mobile interface the Microsoft team has created an demonstration enabling users to try our things from their Android or iOS devices.

Here's Microsoft's concept future vision on how people will get their things done at work, home, and on the go in coming 5-10 years. Watch the concept video to get a glimpse of the future of productivity, a must watch futuristic video for every tech lover.

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.

Microsoft has targeted Google in it' latest satirical video aimed at Gmail, emphasizing the fact how the “Gmail Man” walks around looking inside people’s email showing advertisements based on keywords. Using the video Microsoft is promoting their latest offering Office 365, the newly launched BPOS (Business Productivity Online Suite) replacement, is a more private alternative for businesses. “You email is your business,” the video says. “Google makes it theirs.” - full-video after the jump.

Microsoft Fixit are easy to use one-click solutions to solve most common Windows issue - the user simply needs to download the FixIt solution and execute letting it fix the issue.

To let users automatically diagnose and fix causes of poor system performance, Microsoft has now released a FixIt solution - the diagnostic and fixing tool looks into problems such as the power saver setting, multiple anti-virus programs running, multiple startup programs running, and too many users logged on to the computer providing suggestions and options to fix these issues and improve computer performance.

We reviewed the not so well-known minimalistic free download manager from Microsoft almost a year ago, Microsoft Download Manager has now been updated still featuring the elegant and simplistic design with more features and configuration options.

If you are looking for a decent, simple to use free download manager - Microsoft Download Manager does the task for you, the free utility enables users to download files simply and easily allowing them to manage download tasks with resume support for downloading all types of big files.

Very little information is available about next major upgrade to Microsoft Office product suite family, but now slowly and steadily information is coming out. This time the very first video demonstration of "Microsoft Office 15 - Moorea 15.0.2703.1000" has made it's way to the internet, the video shows tile based metro user-interface with basic functionalities of Moorea.