while i dont have a dedicated partition waiting on 8 yet, i do have enough machines with adequate muscle in this house that i should be able to hijack one of those for testing. i'd expect to start seeing early builds leak sometime late spring, with early beta testers being invited in sometime in the fall. with the success of 7 i would be extremely surprised if MS didn't offer an open RC stage for everyone. all of the hype caused 7 to sell really well and it looks like they are beginning to adopt the practice as a standard for soon to be released software.