I Switched to Mac…Sort of…
John Chow recently got a MacBookPro. He said he’d run Vista on it, but then had a change of heart when he found out how fast and cool OSX was. Then Ed got a MacbookPro and I saw just how quick it was doing graphics when we were up in Whistler for the Snowboard Festival. I personally think they are way overpriced for the hardware that you get. However, the star of the show is really the operating system which is based on UNIX. After observing what the OS could do, I decided to build my own
I’ve been a PC guy all my life and I’m definitely very capable of building up my own PCs. Afterall, I did come second at this year’s Tiger Direct Charity PC Race in Las Vegas. I scrounged around my mountains of PC Hardware and came up with a bunch of Hackintosh ready parts for my first ever OSX build!
I’m currently running an Intel Q6600 2.4 GHz CPU overclocked to 3.0 GHz with 4 GB’s of RAM and an nVidia 8600 GTS on my new Hackintosh. I call this my Gx HackPro Tower! It’s also attached to a 24 inch display. I don’t want to imagine how much this would be if it was an Apple Branded system. When Apple started using INTEL processors, it totally opened up the operating system to being modified to run on PC Hardware. It’s gotten so easy that the right combination of parts will install almost flawlessly with some minor modifications.
I’ve been stressing the machine constantly for the last week or so, throwing insane loads on it. The funny part is that, in situations where a PC would just freeze, I can still continue to multi-task on OSX. What I found even more incredible was the fact that after installing all the applications that mirrored my Vista install, the OSX drive only used 15 GB’s of storage, while the super bloated Vista install took up over 50 GB’s. I always wondered why Mac Users didn’t seem to run out of space. The machine also has not crashed once (unless it was my fault from modding something I shouldn’t have) and the only application that did crash was Microsoft Mac Office 2008. Go figure. This is actually a well documented issue as using the maximize button hangs the system with the office suite software.
The only PCs in my house will be my gaming rig, my test rig and my laptop (but only because I haven’t been able to successfully install OSX on the Asus U1F). After I finish learning everything I need to know, expect to see a guide with some of my best tips for those who want to build a Hackintosh posted up over at Futurelooks. I guess my next step will be to come up with a HackBookPro or a HackBookAir.