Hackintosh disaster recovery part 1

If you use a Mac, making bootable backups are easy, and definitely easier than on a Windows Computer. Using software like Carbon Copy Cloner or Superduper you can clone your Mac’s hard drive to another internal or external USB/Firewire drive. This copy is an exact image of the original drive so you can boot from it and see no difference to using the source drive. Add in smart copies that only copy the changes since the last backup and you have a fast, reliable and easy backup system. Scheduled backups even mean you don’t have to remember to backup, just check it’s working as planed.

I used this method with my Macbook and felt a lot more relaxed making big changes to the system. Updating to 10.5.2 was easily reversible when the wireless networking stopped working. Even the Leopard upgrade from Tiger was no problem when I could easily revert to Tiger if a show stopper surfaced. This ease is one of the factors that made me move my daily computer use to Mac OS, but what happens when you build your own?

Leopard vs XP vs Vista vs Linux part 2

In part 1 I looked at results from Geekbench, Photoshop and VLC to see how much of an impact the operating system has on application speed. For part 2 I used two more cross platform test, the first person shooter Doom 3 and 3D modeller and renderer Blender.

Leopard vs XP vs Vista vs Linux part 1

I’ve wanted to compare different operating systems on the same hardware for several months, to see how much of an impact the OS has. Now that I have been using my hackintosh daily for over a month with no major issues I felt it was time to start doing some comparisons. One of the benefits of using generic hardware to run Mac OS is that it will happily run any other x86 operating system you care to try. The difficult bit seems to be getting them to co-exist without conflicting.

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.

OS wars: which is the best?

The ‘my OS is better than yours’ arguments have been a bit quiet lately, so PCmag have done their bit to restart the flames. The article compares Mac OS Leopard, Windows XP, Windows Vista and Ubuntu 7.10 across a number of aspects to pick which is the best for a range of different user types, as well as the best overall. I won’t spoil the surprise here so have a read to see who they rate the highest.

VMware Vs Virtualbox, round 2

In the first part of my testing of VMware Fusion and Innotek Virtualbox I looked at boot time and geekbench scores. Since Geekbench had issues on VMware (and I still haven’t got to the bottom of that) I have moved onto real world tests. I used the Adobe Photoshop CS3 trial and VLC for the testing. I’m fairly certain everyone has heard of Photoshop, and VLC is an open source media player for a wide range of operating systems.

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.

The new cable modem

Three weeks after Virgin Media told me they would send a new cable modem it finally arrived. I suppose I should be thankful since it only took 20 days to get here when they did advise to allow up to 28 days. It’s really one day to get here as the package was sent yesterday, so I guess my name was added to the next batch to be sent out (am I being cynical wondering how long new customer have to wait?).
I had to call Virgin support to get the MAC address added to their system. Fortunately this was an 0800 number so I didn’t have to pay 25p a minute to sit in the queue like existing customers wanting technical support (sorry, being cynical again). The modem, a Scientific Atlanta 2100, sprang to life within a minute of the MAC address being activated, and it’s looking good so far. I fired up a torrent download and was seeing 1.6MB/s with peaks of 1.9MB/s. Thats a bit faster than the old Motorola modem, and it was looking great until the cap kicked in and I’m now crawling along at 500KB/s.
I’m hoping that’s the last of the lockups that were pinned on the Motorola modem, so I will post again in a week or so if all is going well.

Hackintosh Part 1

It doesn’t look like the mac 10.5.2 update is landing anytime soon (i’m hoping that saying that triggers a quick release), with macrumors reporting that a new 9C30 seed was released to developers on Monday.

Rather than sit around waiting I have started planning my hardware purchase. First on the list is a motherboard, and the model I have settled on is the Gigabyte GA-P35C-DS3R. The whole GA-P35 family looks to be fairly popular with the hackintosh community, and most models are listed on the 10.5.1 hardware compatibility list here. The GA-P35C-DS3R supports the latest Intel 45nm processors, DDR2/DDR3 memory, 8 Sata ports and only needs a patch for the built in audio. I’m quite keen to use a Gigabyte motherboard with the Dual Bios feature, having used them for many of my computers. I only once killed a motherboard with a Bios update back in the days of floppy disk updates, and that was one time too many. Everything on this motherboard apart from the built in audio appears to work with no modification. The board is available for £72.56 from Aria, though I will of course shop around before ordering.

Time Capsule first look

The recently announced Time Capsule wireless router/NAS is due in February (in the UK) for £199 (500Gb) and £329 (1Tb). It’s stated to work with Macs using Time Machine and Windows PC’s as a shared drive, but there’s little info as yet on the interface and access controls. The current Airport Extreme offers users accounts with passwords for restricted access to files and folders, so Time Capsule should offer at least this.
Apple’s usual ease of use is pretty much a given, but does the package offer good value for money? A 500Gb Network Attached Storage box can be bought for £146.86 here. That leaves £53 for a wireless router. You can get a cheap ’super G’ box for £20.56 here, but that’s not Draft-N standard. I couldn’t find any Draft-N routers that cheap, so the 500Gb Time Capsule at £199 looks like good value.
But what about the 1Tb version? The price difference between a bare 500Gb and 1Tb SATA hard drive is around £120 at the moment, but that’s for a standard drive. Apple states the Time Capsule contains a ’server grade’ hard drive, so while the 1Tb Time Capsule doesn’t offer the same cost per Mb as the 500Mb unit, it is competitively priced.
Hopefully these boxes will encourage home users to start taking backups a bit more seriously. It’s fine having a computer that makes it easy to store thousands of songs and photo’s, and hundreds of hours of video, but the more it stores the bigger the shock when it all gets lost.