This is a series where I install and review one of the two mods that are part of the long-gone R Projects team (via Discord server), Windows 8R.
Before I talk about Alpha 3, I'd like to talk about an update with emulation. I recently grabbed a late-2012 Mac mini from another house recently, since it was left there unusable until I made a choice to take it home. This will give me better performance instead of that crappy UTM emulation. Before that, the only choice to emulate correctly was to use UTM, right after I transitioned from Windows last year because the ARM64 port of VirtualBox can't handle it too much and just crashes. You might see now that I'm using a video capture card to capture the HDMI input of my Mac mini to the output of my main computer. You will also see me installing Boot Camp drivers during the review.
Now about the third alpha of 8R, one of the three alpha builds. I'm not technically sure if this is the final alpha, but something tells me there could be a fourth one. Will see?
Anyway, Setup finally gets a redesign at this point, featuring a new background and Windows 8R branding, unlike the previous two alpha builds. The start screen suddenly opened... it came back from Alpha 1, even though Classic Shell is pre-installed. On the taskbar, it now finally has a UserTile feature taken from Windows 8 builds 7814-8002 as an application that would start automatically when logged on. You can change settings and your user account, switch between user accounts, log off, and lock your computer. Winver gets an updated redesign showing the build date, the current stage version, and information about the unofficial project (looks like I know now that vga made the logo, so that makes it three developers from the 8R Projects team, including me!). Windows Essentials 2012 now comes pre-installed, adding Windows Movie Maker and Windows Photo Gallery to 8R. It seems also that GPU-Z is installed here, which obviously checks your GPU, which you can easily access within the added option in Control Panel. And finally, unlike the previous alpha, the logon banner is removed.