Should I build a "Hackintosh?"

[volvoguy87]

A little background:

I have been building PCs for 15 years. I love building computers and working on computer hardware almost as much as I enjoy vintage appliances. I have had the opportunity to use some friends Macs for a few years now, and I have found that I like them quite a lot. The problem is that a real Mac, wonderful as they are, is also very expensive for what you get. Considering that I have never had tech support or a warranty and don't see needing them, should I try to build a "Mac" out of PC parts?

The real Mac I would like to buy is the low-end model, called the Mac Mini. It would do everything I think I would need for the forseeable future. Unfortunately, the configuration I like costs about $1,100.00.

For $950.00 I could build a far higher end computer more akin to the high-end Mac Pro. This includes the cost of parts and software, purchased from Apple (no software piracy here).

The issue is that I have never built a Mac clone. I know it is a big challenge, but it has been done before successfully. I am really leaning toward trying this. If it doesn't work, I can always put Windows on it.

Have any of you done this or know someone who has?
Dave

 

[maytagbear]

If you have the inclination and the time,

then why not?

It will be an adventure, and you'll learn a thing or two, perhaps.

Good to see you again, Dave.

Lawrence/Maytagbear

 

[ttuee2006]

I use one.

$550 about a year ago built me an insanely fast Core2Duo desktop that runs Leopard without a sweat. I actually own a LEGIT copy of Leopard and own 3 Macs, so it was really more or less an experiment to see how well it worked.

Let's just say that I've been exclusively using the Hackintosh for over a year now with near 0 problems. When I got it built, I overclocked the CPU to 2.8 Ghz. A friend of mine has the Octo-Core Mac Pro clocked at 2.8 Ghz with a very similar hardware setup. The funny part is that mine flat out HANDED it's ass to it in synthetic benchmarks such as XBench. It felt much faster in use too. Go figure!

If you're in the market for a REAL mac, skip the Mini. The performance on them is dreadful. Instead, get a MOL MacBook and you'll have the guts of the Mini (albeit a bit beefed up) and the added benefit of being able to take it portable.

 

[autowasherfreak]

I say go for it! I've never used a Mac. I friend of mine had one back in the mid 90's I don't remember much about it.

Dave, I'm having a problem with a Dell laptop that a friend gave me to work on, can I email you about it?

 

[volvoguy87]

Interesting.

Sure, send an email. I am by no means an expert and laptops are an especially great PITA but I'll see if I can reccommend my 2 cents.

Sorry about dropping off the face of the earth for the past month or so. I am going to be moving to Cincinnati, OH within a month if all goes well. Since the end of January I was in Cincinnati looking for a job (no luck yet) and staying with a friend who had no TV, no computer in the house, and no internet. I just got back to Virginia. For whatever it's worth, my friend (Elginkid) was a housemate of mine when I was in grad school in Savannah, GA. He bought a glorious wreck of a Queen Anne (Victorian) house in Mt. Auburn and I was helping him make initial repairs. When I move, I will be his housemate again and we will work on restoring the house. The few posts I was able to make since the end of January were regarding repairing his appliances. I took pictures and will create a thread soon.

One other inspiration for building a Hackintosh is because I don't want to pay more money for slower, smaller, laptop parts like those found in the Mac Mini and iMac when I could spend less money on faster desktop parts myself. I also want a new Intel Core i7 quad core chip and a RAID hard drive array, none of which are available in anything less than a Mac Pro.

Why do I always feel compelled to mess with things?
Dave

 

[swestoyz]

Dave, I've ever cloned a Mac, but I've personally never used anything but an Apple II or a Mac. What are you planning to do with your Mac? Unless you are going to be doing some heavy video editing (the likes of Final Cut Pro, etc), or heavy graphics work with Photoshop, a run of the mill Mini will handle just about anything you throw at it for music, Safari, and data storage.

I bought the recent 20" iMac update with the aluminum case last July and love it. Was using a 2001 Quicksilver G4 previous to that. The extra speed of the Intel duo core and 10.5 really helped out in the video editing department, of the little editing I do in iMovie.

Ben

 

[mattl]

Interesting idea, I've seen it kicked around for years, but not heard too much about how building your own MAC turns out. hope you post some details if you go forward wiht the project. Question, is it the novelty or is there something that you need a MAC for?

I've built all my own computers for close to 2 decades too, and even the laptops I've had I pieced together from stuff on ebay. Well yesterday i went to Best Buy and bought an HP laptop. Kind of a mid range thing, Intel dual core, 16" 16x9 display and a HDMI out. Gotta to say I really like it. Fast as hell, and I find I don't mind Vista.

Got it for two reasons. Both of my local newspapers are stopping daily publication, going to 3 days a week of home delivery, the rest online. Needed something decent to read the news on daily. My other functioning laptop has a dead battery and 256m of memory, not a great machine. Second I got a great deal on an 50" plasma and want something I can hook to that and run some stuff I've downloaded, and perhaps do a very little bit of light weight gaming. This suits my needs perfectly. Still learning my way around Vista, but it's not that difficult.

Got to say there certainly is a lot of crapware on the system, found a de-crapper program to get rid of a bunch, will slowly work my way through the rest. But with a 360g hd there is lots of space for crap.

 

[revvinkevin]

I cannot offer anything about building a "Hackintosh&qu

... but I have been a Apple / Mac user since the Apple lle (just a "little" while)! I currently have a Mac Mini and have been using it about 3 years now and have been very happy with it. Granted I am not doing any hard core video editing or rendering of graphics, but I do use Photoshop a fair amount.

I was surprised to read you want to buy a Mac Mini but it's $1100!! After a visit to Apples website, I see if upgrade the processor and RAM it can approach that $1100 mark.

I guess it really comes down to what you plan to use the computer for, how fast does it really need to be and will you be able to take advantage of all of it's speed potential? Or maybe I'm missing the point of building one "because you can"?

In any event, if you move forward with this "Hackintosh" project, keep us posted! I'd like to hear how it all turns out!
Kevin

 

[volvoguy87]

Definately because I can...

But you are right Kevin. I did select the upgraded processor and I maxed out the RAM at 4 GB, mostly because it is so difficult to upgrade the RAM later. The Mac Mini uses a laptop hard drive which is expensive for relatively small capacity and low speed. For what Apple wants to upgrade the Mac Mini from 120 GB of hard drive to 320 GB, I can buy a much faster external drive of about 750 GB.

I am not a heavy duty gamer, nor do I do any video editing. I would, however, like to do video playback and drive a television, in addition to my regular monitor. I am uncertain of the Mini's ability to do this smoothly.

The reason why I am considering the Mac operating system is because I am fed up with Microsoft and actually like the Mac OS. I have been using Microsoft products since DOS and Windows 3.1. They are generally ok, but there is so much useless crap that comes with Windows these days and my experiences with Vista are that it looks pretty, but doesn't work that well. It runs slower than I think it should, for what it does. I know Apple uses high quality hrdware, but it is generally specked lower than most PC competition, yet Mac OSX runs faster on slower hardware than Windows. Also, I have found Mac OSX to be more user friendly and a lot less annoying than Vista or XP.

I am still researching now, but I might start getting parts this weekend. If it doesn't work, I'll just put my old XP Pro on it until Windows 7 is released.
Dave

 

[panthera]

Dave

I think you might find one of the flavors of Linux equal to and in many ways better than Leopard.

I'd give it a try first.

And before the Mac disciples jump dirty on me as usual, guess what everything since Carbon is based on...

Personally, I like apple design and much software written for their platform throughout the '90s into this century was better than Windows. Now that even Adobe has ported their programs for everyone, there is no longer a compelling reason to stick with Mac.

Today, you can get brilliant design, equally mediocre hardware and the same programs for less using Linux.

 

[mattl]

There is at least one media oriented Linux distro out there.

As I mentioned earlier I have a few crappy laptops and computers sitting around, too man in fact. I've got a bunch of old Digital Pentium Pros sitting here that are built like tanks. Thinking of donating them to some seniors who don't need speed.

Anyway, I've been exploring various Linux distros and came across a version of Puppy geared to video work. Nice setup. It was barely OK on the P Pro, just tried it for the heck of it, but on a decent system it should scream. At this point odds are I downloaded over a dozen variations of Linux, Puppy seems to be my favorite, PC Linux a second.

Anyway, I never did find a distro that worked as easily or as well as the good old Win 2k that I put on the systems years ago. MS gave me some free copies, so I might just load those and leave it at that.

I'll be curious to hear that you end up doing.

 

[cadman]

It's tough to stomach the asking price for the Mini, no doubt about it. The first rule in buying a Mac is upgrade the RAM and HD after the purchase for pennies on the dollar as Apple's markup is pretty steep. That said, you do get a lot more for the dollar than at first glance. The glass multi-gesture touchpads, the slot loading burners, the integrated camera and backlit keyboards, and additional stuff the PC laptops and desktops are now adding to their lineup. But when using the PB, this stuff doesn't feel "tacked on" like my work HP notebook, littered in LEDs and buttons posing as features- some here, some there, some on the side. Sometimes they all work, sometimes none, and sometimes you have to use the software shortcuts and then they'll work. Frustrating to the point where I end up not using these so-called features.

I also seem to get a lot more mileage out of the Mac. My G4 Powerbook is 5 years old now, and the GF's Pismo is 8 or 9 years old(!). For a C-note we upgraded the RAM, HD and put on 10.4 and she does everything with it. These also had the built-in wifi which configured itself upon tucking an airport card under the keyboard. It's hard not to be impressed.

 

[revvinkevin]

Dave.....

Actually upgrading the RAM or hard drive after you get a Mac Mini home is not difficult (and yes, less $$$ too!) once you know the trick to opening the case. I upgraded the RAM in my Mini and it was very easy, I didn't see the need to install a larger HD so I didn't. Surprisingly the "special tool" needed to open the Mac Mini case is just a simple, flat blade putty knife! I found a "how to" video online and watched it. He talked about how to, the required tools and technique, he then opened the case, upgraded the ram, installed a larger hard drive and closed it back up…. all in about 10 minutes!

The link below is another video I just looked up. The text in the video is hard to read, but you'll get the idea how to open it.

http://mactweak.blogspot.com/2006/03/how-to-open-mac-mini.html

 

[gizmo]

Linux

I am no authority on the subject, but I am now using Puppy Linux and looking at other distros. I have an old Compaq laptop with 192 mb ram, running Win Me. ME is no longer supported by MS, my printer doesn't work with ME, and my anti virus product is saying they will no longer support ME soon. So I went looking for a newbie-friendly version of Linux that will work with this old machine. Puppy is very light on system resources, easy to use, and it is intended to be used from a CD rather than install on HD, so there is no need to partition the hard drive or format it. Puppy creates a small file inside the Windows partition on the HD, and files and settings are saved there. Windows is not affected by that file. So to boot windows ME, I start the computer as normal with no CD in the drive. To start Puppy Linux I simply put the Puppy Linux CD in the drive before starting the computer, the Cd is detected and it boots into Puppy. The first start involves setting up mouse, keyboard and video display settings, these are saved at the first close down. Future starts are fast, much faster to start and shut down than Windows was.
I have gone back to using Puppy Linux 4.1.2 which is the latest version of Puppy, there are variations available including Macpuppy, which I have also used and is a version which is designed to look, feel and work like a Mac. It is very good but it seems to need more system resources than the standard Puppy, so on my computer it keeps stopping to access the CD, and the browser (opera) keeps closing itself. In standard Puppy, the computer loads the software into ram and there isn't the constant stopping to read the CD drive.
The beauty of Puppy is that you can run it entirely from CD without having to upset your installation of Windows. Its downside is that being designed to run from CD means it must be very small and light, which limits how many bells and whistles it can have, it has a suite of software included which are all "light versions" rather than the "latest and greatest" versions.

I have had one problem I can't solve yet - on Macpuppy, I set up my printer using CUPS and it works, but I had a document that messed up during printing and I can't cancel the print job - I now have two jobs in the print queue and if I try to select "cancel job", I get an error message saying "client-error-forbidden."
Last night I changed back to standard Puppy Linux (after the other problems I was having with Macpuppy) and I have not yet tried to cancel a document in that version of CUPS.

I am also playing with Dreamlinux and Knoppix live CDs but I have not been able to get either of them to work. I am still working through the issues with the Dreamlinux forum (they are very helpful) and will get on to Knoppix soon. Knoppix boots up and gives a shell with heaps of text but when it changes to a GUI the screen goes blank. I don't even know which GUI it is using, yet.

Chris.

 

[volvoguy87]

On Linux.

I have played with Linux Fedora. While I like it, I am finding it difficult to learn Linux. I already know Mac OS X. Don't get me wrong, Linux can be great and I am thinking of a dual boot with Mac OS X and Linux Fedora so I can continue to learn, but I am not ready for full-time Linux.

Still, an interesting idea,
Dave

 

[mattl]

Media apps on Linux

Take a look at this distro, it's the one I mentioned. It's a live CD so you can play all you want.

http://www.puppylinux.org/downloads/puplets/mediapup