Hackintosh part 10

When I completed the build and testing of my hackintosh I still had plans for some future updates to the hardware. 2Gb of Ram is fine for general use but gets used up fast if you start running windows in a virtual machine as well as Mail, Firefox, Graphic Converter and several other apps. I’ve now added another 2Gb of PC800 Kingston ram of the same spec as the original, and it’s working fine. System Profiler reports four banks of 1Gb PC800 ram and no problems. I can now allocate 1Gb of Ram to a virtual machine without slowing down the rest of the system.

Are Psystar for real?

The debate on Psystar and their ‘Opencomputer’ platform of pre built hackintosh’s continues. A couple of days ago Cnet published a review after they managed to get their hands on one of the mythical machines. Today there’s another article discussing the legal implications of what Psystar are doing, and the struggle ahead of them if Apple decides to take legal action. Good luck in that fight, I would say starting a legal battle with a company that has 19.4 Billion Dollars in cash is suicidal. I’m almost hoping Apple do decide to take action if only to see how the EULA hold up. Companies have been restricting our use of the items we buy for some time now, so maybe it’s about time someone challenged that.

Reviewers are gradually coming around to the idea that Psystar may be legitimate, though I would still wait to hear of a reasonable number of computers shipped before buying one. I’m sitting on the fence here, as the OS X updates page at Psystar is still empty. Lets see what happens when the imminent 10.5.3 is released.

Hackintosh disaster recovery part 2

In part one I looked at the steps I took to get my hackintosh working again after accidentally overwriting the boot information. The computer has been working fine for over three weeks since, and I haven’t found any side effects with software or hardware. My latest efforts have been focused on making bootable backups for use in the event of an unbootable hackintosh.

Hackintosh goes mainstream?

With the recent news that Psystar are offering Mac OS compatible computers with Leopard pre-installed it appears the mainstream Mac press have taken notice. Macworld published an article yesterday detailing Rob Griffiths experiences of building and testing a hackintosh. Not much in the way of information on the install process, but there are some benchmarking results using Cinebench, Quake 3 and Xbench.

Its a good read until the conclusion, which I strongly disagree with. Listing the ‘many pitfalls’ as including ‘follow poorly-translated instructions to get everything put together’ makes me wonder what instructions Rob was using. There are some clear and well written guides online, especially at InsanelyMac. Having to shop around for the best components is something PC builders and users have done for years to get the right system, so it’s not a hackintosh weakness. And as for the case not being as attractive as a Mac Pro, is that really why people buy Mac Pro’s?

Read at Macworld

Buy a Hackintosh?

One of the nice things about blogging with WordPress is seeing incoming links i.e. sites that are linking to posts on this site. One that showed up yesterday was from VJforums.com, from a thread about a company called Psystar. This organisation are selling ready built hackintosh’s from their Florida site, under the title of ‘Openmac’. After a little browsing the site it looks like the computers are supplied with an install disk that I suspect installs the EFI emulation software allowing Leopard to be installed on top. The hardware spec can be customised within the available components and Leopard can be pre-installed. The biggest question is how long will this be available before Apple’s legal team are on the case? I’ve just tried accessing the site for some more info and it’s down, so maybe Apple have already struck. The Wayback machine internet archive doesn’t have any backups of the site from the last year so I’m guessing the Openmac hasn’t been around for long. More news if the site appears again.

UPDATE: The site is now back up, and the ‘Open Mac’ platform has now changed name to ‘Open Computer’. This story was widely reported on a number of sites, but none seem to have any reason for the name change. So did Apple have something to say, or did the exposure suggest caution?

Hackintosh part 9

I’ve been using my DIY Mac for about a month so it’s time for an update on how well everything is working. I haven’t had any major show stoppers so far, more minor irritations and puzzling behaviours. It’s a pleasure to use the hackintosh and having run Mac OS on several machines in the past the huge performance improvement makes the OS more responsive than ever. I’ve read reviews in the past that say you haven’t experienced Mac OS at it’s best until you try a Mac Pro, and they’re not exagerating.

Macs are easy?

Apple products have had a reputation for ease of use for a long time, but I’m starting to think this has gone seriously awry with Leopard. Up to the release of 10.5 I didn’t have a problem operating Macs on a mixed Mac and Windows network. Leopard brought the promise of automatic discovery and display of network shares in the Finder sidebar. I think I mentioned this before, but it worked for half an hour then disappeared. I’ve spent several hours yesterday and today trying to figure out what is going wrong with this, and got to the point where my Macbook and Hackintosh were both visible to each other. The Macbook could connect to the Hackintosh shares, but not the other way round. Add to this the problems I had when upgrading my Macbook to 10.5.2 where the wireless access points became unconnectable and there’s some serious networking issues with Leopard. Does anyone have a fix for this?

Parallels Vs Virtualbox

In previous posts I compared VMware Fusion and Innotek Virtualbox, and looked at how both of these running Windows XP measured up to native apps on my hackintosh. To complete the testing of the big three Virtual Machine packages I have run the same tests on Parallels.

VMware Vs Virtualbox, round 1

I recently discovered Virtualbox, a free virtual machine client for Windows, Mac and Linux. I’ve had a chance to start some basic benchmarking of Virtualbox, so here are the results compared to VMware fusion. As a reminder, I’m running Mac OS 10.5.2 on a Core 2 Quad @3Ghz with 2Gb ram and a 500Mb Samsung HD501LJ hard drive.

The first test was boot time. Both apps were the only ones running on the Mac, with 512Mb memory allocated and one virtual processor. Windows XP Pro was the guest operating system, freshly installed with nothing extra but a virus checker added and all the latest Windows software updates. Time was measured from clicking the start button for the Virtual Machine to the appearance of the Windows desktop taskbar. VMware took 21 seconds, Virtualbox took 17 seconds. Fairly close, but impressive for the free Virtualbox to knock a few seconds off the commercial VMware.

Hackintosh part 8

In previous articles I’ve covered the choice of components, build and testing of my new DIY Mac. There’s been very little in the way of problems so far, and I have a machine that measures up pretty well to the current low end Mac Pro. To get some idea of how the hackintosh and Mac Pro compare, here’s a list of components and prices.