Get ready all you consumers for your first taste of the future of Windows. Microsoft announced Wednesday it’s rolling out a fresh preview of Windows 8, and this one, called the Windows 8 Consumer Preview, is for everyone to try. This Metro-styling interface is not your father’s desktop OS. It’s not even your big brother’s desktop operating system. It looks and works differently — at least most of the time — than all Windows that have come before it (though you can still find a more familiar-looking OS just a mouse move or gesture away). The OS is designed to run on standard Windows PCs (anything that ran Windows 7) and ARM-based devices — think tablets.

Windows 8 Consumer Preview is quite a bit different from the developers version released last year. All parts of it have been touched, said Sinofsky, and improved in Windows 8. “We have made over 100,000 code changes to Windows 8. So for many people, this is a whole new product,” said Sinofsky. He also said the OS is “alive at a glance” and that it can work from entry-level to hard-core users. It can scale across use scenarios and will work with apps. Apps will work together “to get richer.” One app plus another app will be like three apps, said Sinofsky.

Microsoft started planning Windows 8 before Windows 7 was delivered, so devices that would support it didn’t even exist, said Julie Larson-Green Corporate VP for the Windows Management Program. They actually walked around the halls of Microsoft with cardboard cut-outs to try and get a feel for how the Windows 8 tablet should work.

During the tablet demo, Larson zipped through the Metro-style interface to show how “fast and fluid” it is. A quick look at Internet Explorer in Windows 8 Consumer Preview shows how different the experience is than what you find on the standard Windows desktops. Windows 8 also introduces the concept of share contracts that apps use to work with each other. Microsoft used this portion of the demo to pitch its cloud-services: SkyDrive, which is pretty deeply integrated into Windows 8. We also got a preview of some of the upcoming Windows 8 hardware, including Microsoft partner systems from Lenovo, Samsung, Acer and HP. We saw an next-gen Ultrabook with a touch screen, and Lenovo’s Yoga foldable, touch-screen laptop. All were running Windows 8.