Microsoft has today announced that UK customers will only have to pay £24.99 for Windows 8 when it is released on October 26th, which is a huge wight of everyone’s shoulders who previously had worry’s that the software will cost around £40, due to the $39.99 expected price tag in the US.

Amazon has already begun taking pre-orders for the packaged version of the operating system, priced at £49, but if you do want to pre-order the OS, they should change this over time.

Screenshot’s for Skype’s new app for Microsoft’s renamed UI is being leaked across the internet, the Neowin team leaked the new app after they had the chance to use the new app for Windows 8 and Windows Phone devices.

Within the new application, Skype has been remodeled from ground up with a neater layout, and a new set of color schemes for each conversation, alongside this the app will also run in the background much like the current app.

Obviously the app has not been finished yet, but we should hear more soon.

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Microsoft has finally shipped the final code of the new Windows 8 OEMs, which means that anyone who is a MSDN or TechNet subscriber can download the RTM build and use the software from today, a good ten weeks before anyone else that doesn’t work at Microsoft or a tech company.

If you are a normal person however you will have to wait until the software is officially released on October 26th.

if you have got access to the RTM however, let us know what you think of it in the comments below.

Windows 8 will launch on October 26th but already details are emerging that the next OS will be codenamed “Blue”.

ZDNet reports that the next operating system for the PC will come with the codename “Blue, instead of the obvious “Windows 9″ brand, the news comes from sources to the blog who claim the update will be coming next year.

Which makes us wonder if Microsoft would start releasing yearly operating systems, much like Apple or would they just release this as a service pack.

Which actually makes sense as Microsoft have already set the upgrade price to $39.99 for previous Windows 7 users or testers, which shows that Microsoft may be leaning more towards Apple’s cheap and regular OS updates.

The next operating system, be it Blue or Windows 8 is rumored to be released sometime in summer 2013 and will likely have the same pricing structure as Windows 7.

Via [ZDNet]

I know a wallpaper leak isn’t much to go on for a new operating system, but its defiantly something to give you a better view of the OS, Techit posted the image of the wallpaper which you can see above.

The image has been confirmed to be the wallpaper for the final default wallpaper, and takes a different step for Microsoft, showing two daisy flowers with a clear sky behind them, which is unusual that it doesn’t include a Windows logo.

We can expect to see the wallpaper in real life before the next couple of weeks are over,and the final release for customers will make its way on October 26th.

Via [Techit]

Like it or not there are still a lot of Microsoft customers out there still running Windows XP on their PCs with no intention to every upgrade, my dad is one of them. Despite this it seems the Symantec have made there most recent update unavailable to these users, causing some XP  users PCs to crash repeatedly with that oh so well-known ‘blue screen of death’.

Symantec have said that the issue has been limited to machines running any combination of Windows XP and lies within its latest Sonar antivirus software version, they also added that the “root cause of the issue was an incompatibility due to a three-way interaction between some third-party software that implements a file system driver using kernel stack based file objects – typical of encryption drivers, the SONAR signature and the Windows XP Cache manager,”

In order to fix it Symantec say to remove the software manually and disable their machines, and wait for them to find a solution to the problem. This is extremely bad work for a company who has been providing Antivirus for a long time now, and I would have expected a lot more from the company when it comes to testing their software before a release.

Let us know what you think in the comments below.

Netflix is coming to Windows 8 and that’s all we have they havn’t released much more information unfortunatly.

Devloping, check out the liveblog for more.

Via [The Verge]

If you purchase a new Windows 7 PC between June 2nd and February 28th, Microsoft has confirmed this morning that you will be able to upgrade it to Windows 8 for £14.99 or as we already know $14.99 in the US upon launch date.

This deal is actually pretty a lot like the one Apple announced at the release of Lion, and will likely increase the amount of people purchasing a PC between those dates.

On the date Windows 8 is launched those who took advantage of this deal will receive a promotional code for Windows 8 Pro along with instructions on how you can update to the new OS, alongside all of that you will also get 90 days of Microsoft technical support.

Any PC running Windows 7 Home Basic, Home Premium, Professional, or Ultimate between June 2, 2012, and February 28, 2013 and register it at www.windowsupgradeoffer.com.

[via TechRadar]

Alienware’s M11X was one of the first 11.6 inch laptops to be granted the title of a gaming laptop, but there is a new kid on the block now, and it comes in the form of Maingear’s Pulse 11, which as you can tell from the name is only 11.6 inches but still holds some great gaming capabilities.

The beastly gaming laptop will give you a Core i5 or i7 processor, a NVIDIA GeForce GT 650 GPU, 11.6 inch backlit screen with a 1366 x 768 resolution, up to 16GBs of DDR3 RAM, 802.11b/g/n WiFi, a 9 in 1 card reader, all for as little as $999.

But if you want the top spec model with the core i7 processor, 16GBs of RAM, 600GB SSD, blu-ray burner, Intel’s advanced 802.11n WiFi with bluetooth, HD webcam, and Windows 7 Ultimate 64-bit, you’re looking at a price tag of $3,026.99.

As you could guess by the dollar sign the device is so far only shipping in the US starting this week, but us British folk can be hopeful that one day it might hit our shores, check out the press release below for a bit more info.

Microsoft have been very busy today only just debuting the Release Preview of Windows 8, and now they have outed the Release Candidate of Windows Server 2012, which is available for download from today.

The candidate is designed similar to the Windows 8, with a replaced Start Menu as well as the introduction of the new Metro UI, but it has also been reported that Microsoft have weirdly removed legacy code which allows the user to switch back to the classic desktop start menu, for reasons we are not sure about.

But the new Server OS will feature the new Resilient File System, which has been made to handle heavy-duty data and manage shared storage across multiple machines, alongside a hopeful backwards compatibility.

With Microsoft’s newest OS, Windows 8 leaked only a couple of days ago they have finally decided to make the Release Preview of Windows 8 available now, which means that they are a whole day earlier than what was expected.

The new operating System preview is the final test copy of Windows 8 to be released to the public, and will allow us to see what the OS will bring us before its eventual release date.

We already know that the preview will include various improvements on the built-in Metro style apps alongside some new ones from third-party developers.

We should have an overview for you in the next couple of hours so be sure to look out for that, and let us know in the comments what you think about the new OS, will you be buying it on release?

Unless you don’t keep up much with what happens in the tech world, then you may have heard of Microsoft’s newest OS called, Windows 8. The release preview to which was supposed to be available during the first week of June, but it seems that a Chinese edition of the Release Preview has already been circulating around the web prior to this official début.

The build is a lot like the Consumer and Developer Preview’s you may or may not have already seen, but includes some new apps alongside an updated boot screen, wallpapers, cursors and some much-needed multiple monitor desktop improvements.

Of course as this is just a preview it doesn’t matter too much that it has been leaked, with the full operating system rumored to be launched sometime in October.

[Via The Verge]

You may have heard of Raspberry Pi by now, with their cheap Linux boards capable of running a full OS at the price of just $25/$35, but the current board isn’t the end for the team behind it as we have seen today with the unveiling of a new 14 megapixel add-on for the board.

Currently it’s just a prototype but the team at Raspberry Pi are saying it should be available to shop later this year with the ability to simply plug into your existing chop through the CSI pins.

But according to the blog post you may not get the same 14MP camera sensor as they want to make it as cheap as possible, check out some of the pics below, and once your done click on the source link for more info.

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Via [Raspberry Pi]

Remember when you where first picking out your Windows 7 disc and the man made you choose from a total of 6 different versions, well thats nothing compared to Windows 8 which will have a colossal total of 8 versions.

This many versions is most defiantly going to annoy a lot of people as it did with Windows 7, mainly because you would have to pick and choose between several versions with minimal differences between them.

When looking through the settings of Windows 8 Consumer Preview you will find a list of these versions, if you want to find it just go to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Component Based Servicing\PackageIndex\Product, here is that list:

The biggest one that confuses a lot of people currently is the Enterprise Eval edition, which by it’s name could be a trail edition which is something we have never seen from Windows.

What do you think about these 8 new versions of Windows?

A couple of days ago we told you that RaspBerry Pi was going to be making a huge announcement, and that they have as finally after 6 years of developing they have got the device into two manufactures to be sold.

Currently there are two Models which are Model A and Model B, but so far the B model is the only version available, but it is still quite amazing at £25 you receive and feature these specs:

• Broadcom BCM2835 700MHz ARM1176JZFS processor with FPU and Videocore 4 GPU
• GPU provides Open GL ES 2.0, hardware-accelerated OpenVG, and 1080p30 H.264 high-profile decode
• GPU is capable of 1Gpixel/s, 1.5Gtexel/s or 24GFLOPs with texture filtering and DMA infrastructure
• 256MB RAM
• Boots from SD card, running the Fedora version of Linux
• 10/100 BaseT Ethernet socket
• HDMI socket
• USB 2.0 socket
• RCA video socket
• SD card socket
• Powered from microUSB socket
• 3.5mm audio out jack
• Header footprint for camera connection
• Size: 85.6 x 53.98 x 17mm

If you want to get your hands on one you’re gonna have to wait a little longer as so far all you can do is register your interest and wait for an e-mail, but if you still want to do so you can get them from element14/Farnell or RS Components.