Hackintosh anyone?
 

Has anyone ever built/used a hackintosh before? I am debating on selling my 27" IMac to fund a computer project which would leave with with a i7 quad core processor 6 gigs of ram as well as an OSX powered netbook.

My 3.02 intel duo just isn't cutting it anymore when I edit videos/pictures.

Nope. I have plenty of experience with 1366 setups though, the i7 920/930 is a fantastic chip for the cost. Why are you bothering with OSX? The only reason I can think of is for final cut pro.. Unless you have to use a mac-only editing suite you might as well run win7.

I don't have to run it, but I really have fallen in love with FCP and alot of the way the mac os is.

I don't really feel like dealing with linux and prefer the mac os>windows. I have several computers around the house (including 2 windows machines) and just always find myself using the mac for a variety of reasons.

I converted my other 2 year old Gateway p7805u into a dualbooting hackintosh with snow leopard + Windows 7. There are quite a few isos and how-tos around that make it a pretty easy and straightforward process. My only problem is there aren't any kexts for the wireless card, but that may have been resolved since the last time I messed with it over a year ago.


That said, it should be pretty easy, assuming there are drivers for all your hardware.

A friend of mine, who is an IT guru for some medical transcription company, has two laptops; a Dell and a Powerbook.

The Dell runs OSx. The PowerBook runs XP.

He does it just to be different.

I used OSX in a VMware virtual machine a while back. Certainly wasn't capable of doing anything quickly since my rig is old and weaksauce, but it was neat to see.

I tri-boot a Lenovo S-10 netbook with OS-X 10.6, Ubuntu 9something and XP. I did it about a year ago for shits and giggles. OS-X runs fine until I try to run video then it runs for maybe 2-3 minutes and then kernels.

I ran a hackintosh for a long time. I stopped because I wanted to play video games again. Now that all the games I want to play are out on mac I might switch back. The biggest thing is to make sure the hardware you get is easily supported.

If I were making my living using my computer I wouldn't run a Hackintosh OS. For fun, then why not. My concern would be OS security patches, a co-worker was running a Hackintosh which at the time (don't know if they do it now) wasn't auto-patching and ended up getting hacked (ironic?). This could have had more to do with his lack of due diligence than the OS.

I like stable problem free computers, as they are the tools I make a living with.

It was only the major updates that you could not auto-install and generally there were was a work around within a few days. I would guess your co-worker was an idiot and just got hacked.

No they are not. Overclocked Xeon X3440 is the best band for the buck. $230 Nehalem CPU that can run for months @ 3.6GHz on an OEM cooler while being @ 70* C? I'll take 10 (well, I actually have 16 already :p)

Oh, and it can take ECC RAM as well.

I've first started running Hackintosh back in a day when Apple JUST switched to running on an Intel platform. It was extremely unreliable and was crashing few times per day. Only recently everything became much better and I know several people who run Hackintosh full-time for work and don't experience any issues. Apparently you are even able to do updates without a problem!

I've been a full-time OSX/Mac users for about 5 years now. Never looked back.

I've got a latitude 630, mini 10v and most recently an aspire Revo just installed as the new htpc running plex. I work full time on a MacPro and can't ever see moving over to hack when it comes to work. You never know when there will be a obstacle in an update. The latitude was a pita primarily because the user group was small enough where it required playing with customized os files to get it work, and then it still does weird shit every now and then. I just don't want to deal with that crap in the middle of work. Fwiw you can pick up an 8 core intel pro for used <$1500.