seems pretty realistic for a end year shelfing with manufactors producing laptops/desktops months before with the rtm , Although the original announcement came at Japan’s Windows 8 Dev Days event, Microsoft spread the word about an upcoming Release Preview of Windows 8 via one of the company’s Twitter feeds earlier today. A tweet from the Building Windows 8 Twitter feed (@BuildWindows8) stated,“Announce...Windows 8 Release Preview first week of June. Here's the announce from Japan's Windows 8 Dev Days #thankyou”. Pay no mind to the spelling errors---that’s Twitter for you. Anyway, the tweet was accompanied by the image below. The Windows 8 Release Preview should be a much more polished, and feature complete edition of Microsoft’s upcoming OS. The changes that came between the original Developer Preview release and the Consumer Preview, which arrived earlier this year, were fairly dramatic. We don’t expect the June Windows 8 Release Preview to be much different from the Consumer Preview in terms of its appearance, but it should be more feature complete and performance optimized than its predecessors. Driver support should be better as well. If Windows 8 follows a schedule similar to Windows 7’s, the new OS may be released to manufacturing (RTM) sometime in the August timeframe. The Windows 7 Release Candidate was released in May and the final version was RTM about two months later in July, and full retail availability came in October. Give or take a few weeks, that puts the Windows 8 RTM edition on pace for an August / September arrival, with the retail edition hitting store shelves in time for the busy holiday shopping season. source Microsoft Insights: Windows 8 Release Preview to arrive first week of June Microsoft officials have said previously that the company is not necessarily sticking to the same timeline it followed with Windows 7, but it’s hard not to compare. Here’s what that looked like: Windows 7 beta released: January 2009 Windows 7 Release Candidate released: May 2009 Windows 7 RTM: July 2009 Windows 7 launch: October 2009 Windows 8 beta (Consumer Preview) released: February 2012 Windows 8 Release Candidate (Release Preview) released: June 2012 Windows 8 RTM: Late July/August 2012 Windows 8 launch: October 2012