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 ***** 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 )

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 **** 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.