The folks at Microsoft have just pushed out the long-awaited consumer preview of Windows 8. The relevant disk images are available for download from the “Windows 8 Consumer Preview ISO Images” page. On the downloads page, Microsoft have provided you with the product key you will need to install your copy, plus the 32-bit and 64 bit downloads.
If you are going to give the consumer preview a try, I would suggest you do one of the following:
option 1: Install the consumer preview on another hard drive,
option 2: Install VirtualBox or VMWare Player and run the consumer preview inside a virtual machine
option 3(the most dangerous in my opinion): Install the consumer preview on a separate partition of your hard drive.
Of course, I will be downloading my copy and trying it out for myself, so stay tuned for my first impressions of the consumer preview of Windows 8.