Windows 8 available Oct 26

More important when is Visual Studio 2012 available as third party devs writing anything natively for Windows 8 are going to need it.

So far it's at release candidate stage.

Re Windows 8 while I love Metro on my HTC Trophy Windows Phone 7, I think that Metro is going to be hated on Windows 8, I think a touch driven interface will go horribly with a mouse for any full size desktop machines and the notion of relegating the current Windows desktop to one tiny little tile for backwards compatibility and having complete user interface switching back and forth from Metro to the old Windows Desktop is going to be a dogs breakfast.

I've not played with 8 yet might set it up in a Virtual Machine this weekend to see what it's like.

I can see me and others staying with Windows 7 (which is very very nice in my opinion) for a long long long time.

Well Visual Studio 2012 is being released to manufacture today and can be downloaded later today on MSDN so that gives me exactly two months to get my software compatible with Windows 8, to be honest I will not bother making it compatible as businesses are not going to move to this environment any time soon, it's going to be a business disaster in my view.

Personally nothing, for others they will want it on tablet PC's.

Windows Phone 8 looks very interesting as it is now based much more on the REAL windows core code, Windows Phone 7 was already very nice and 8 looks like it will be a big leap forward especially if Nokia bring out some killer handsets.

When Google announced Android I downloaded the development kit but never really got a chance to get into it as at the time I was too busy with real paying work and although I knew it would probably be successful I missed the boat, not a great fan of Java at the best of times anyway.

Third party companies had long long ago developed user shells for Windows CE, long before Android, that looked and behaved like Android, so the User Interface was no big deal for me, nor was the iPhone to be honest, I had one for 2 years and I was not that impressed as I have had powerful Smartphones for the last 10 years that did all the stuff that the iPhone did, maybe not as simply or as prettily but still did the job.

So I am back with Windows Phone 7 which while it is pretty it is crippled from a programming point of view compared to Windows CE that came before it, Windows Phone 8 will fix this which is why it is becoming interesting to me once more.

I have no problem with Microsoft dominating the PC and laptop market, they have built an incredibly good platform that has served the business world for two decades now, it does it job remarkably well and is a hell of a lot simpler to work with at the low level than any version of Unix, Linux included, and yes I have used Ubuntu and many other Linux distro's, great operating system but just not great for business desktops.

I don't count Android as a full blown operating system yet anyway, it looks like it's getting there but it has as you say a long way to go.

You would be surprised, Linux has not penetrated business and public sector for a lot of very valid reasons.

The total cost of ownership for a public service like the NHS of Computer hardware is not a simple equation, standardisation and interoperability are major concerns as are training, application development, hardware support and software support, the cost of the operating system is a tiny fraction of the cost of supporting the IT infrastructure of an organisation. Linux being free really make so little difference as not to matter, remember companies like Red Hat make money out of supporting Linux in business environments not from sales and the do well enough.

You also need to realise that public sector and big business even small business get massive volume discounts from Microsoft when they implement Windows and Office across their organisations and quite frankly nothing comes up to the quality of end user experience of Microsoft Office for a business environment, again standardisation and interoperability with the rest of the world are what matter here.

Regards your Anti virus cost concerns, on Windows you should just use Microsoft Security Essentials it's free, fast, unobtrusive and simply works, unlike the majority of bloatware anti virus packages on the market, Symantec being a particular personal pet hate of mine.

And finally the reason that Linux is relatively free from virus's is that it is simply not that popular on the desktop, any operating system that is successful will draw attacks from the black hat community which also explains the problems you experienced with Android, it is quite simply very popular so it is a target.

I should have checked my release information a bit closer, Windows 8 RTM (release to manufacturing) is also happening today as well as the Visual Studio 2012 RTM and I will be able to download it later on today.

Might give it a try in a VMware virtual machine, if Microsoft's server don't grind to a halt with all the downloads

Windows 8 is effectively Windows 7 with a new layer on the User interface, this layer is designed for touch.

Since Vista, hardware really needed to start moving to WDM (Windows Driver Model) otherwise it would not work with later OS versions.

If the hardware is WDM compatible then it will work if not it won't.

I've had Windows 8 (full release to manufacturing version (RTM)) for two months now, not got round to installing it yet but I will eventually.

Seemed like a very lame launch

According to the Compatibility Center the Epson 4870 is not compatible with Windows 7 or 8

What this means is that Epson have not had their drivers tested by WHQL (Windows Hardware Quality Labs) but they do however supply their own drivers for the OS, currently there is no specific driver from Epson for Windows 8, however I would bet you a reasonable sum of money that if you explicitly install the Windows 7 driver it will work.

Microsoft are deprecating the drawing API's in Windows as they move away from the traditional desktop which was based on GDI and GDI+ there is a new rendering engine in Windows 8 based around XAML however I've not looked into it in detail.

However they still have to support GDI and GDI+ for a long long time into the future so the Device Contexts, Printing and Scanning API's have to be supported for a very long time too. These API's are not about to change so Epson will either instruct people to use the old driver or will bring out an update that is basically the Win 7 driver repackaged for Windows 8.

Reason it's cheap? Well I can only assume that Microsoft are bricking it at the thought of losing the consumer, they will continue to own the Enterprise market for a long time but most people only use the computer as an interface to the internet these days and all these dumb tablets do that well enough for most people now.

edit: I meant to explain that only WHQL tested and approved drivers can be included in the Windows installation media, manufacturers usually supply a basic bare bones WHQL driver to Microsoft for inclusion in the installation media.

Yeah Media Center is a nice app.