It’s do-able. That said, it wasn’t fun.
I’ll try to walk through the steps it took. Much of this is done by memory, but I just finished, so it’s fairly fresh in my mind (although I’m rather sleep deprived at the moment so bear with me).
It’s worth noting that I used an ATI 4850 video card. If you go with an nVidia card, it may be a lot easier (try it on your own before paining yourself with this process).
Network, video, sound (at least 2-channel anyway), microphone are working. Sleep isn’t (so disable it in the Energy Saver section in System Preferences)
The stuff you might need:
-Retail Snow Leopard disk (hopefully you’ve bought it already)
-An existing install, or Rebel EFI otherwise (it’s a free download).
-USB hard drive or USB memory stick
-the MyHack installer
-Netkas’s PC EFI v10.5
-Voodoo HDA
-Kext Helper
Huge thanks to each of the Read more…
The MSI GT735 is a nice affordable gaming notebook computer currently going for around $1000 CDN. Here’s the issue though – the model we got from NCIX has 4GB of RAM, yet it comes with 32-bit Windows Vista. As most people are well aware, the 32-bit version caps out at a little over 3GB of usable RAM – the rest is wasted.
Unfortunately, as great as the GT735 is, MSI doesn’t offer up 64-bit drivers on their website – so even if you get Vista/7 x64 to take available of all 4GB of RAM, you may be worried about the driver issue.
Well worry no more. Read more…
Oct 25 2009 Update: before plunking down money on a paid anti virus program with activation, you may want to read http://mattgadient.com/2009/10/25/anti-virus-software-and-activation-why-free-just-might-be-better-than-paid/
With the final version of Windows 7 finally being released by Microsoft on Technet, and having a subscription, I decided it was time to grab a copy and start playing with some anti-virus programs to see what the ideal paid anti-virus program might be.
The most commonly talked about AV’s tend to be the offerings from Symantec (Norton), Kaspersky, and NOD32. They all offer free 30-day trials, so away I went. I grabbed the following:
- Kaspersky 2010 (not as easily found on the site, but they have a link stickied in the forums which installs as a trial just fine for those who want to do their own checking)
- Symantec Endpoint Protection 12.0
- NOD32 v4.0 Read more…
A minor issue I ran into. My brother got a copy of Spore for Christmas and didn’t have time to play it, so he’s loaned it to me for the time being. I thought I’d give it a try on the hackintosh (using an iDeneb OSX86 installation).
It installed fine. Problem was that when running it, the screen was black. There was sound, but that was it. Did a little searching… and not a lot of luck. I found that alt-enter (or applekey-enter) sometimes worked for people having full screen issues. I tried it, and noticed the monitor continually bouncing to power-saving mode, then normal again. I decided to do a little guessing and deductive reasoning, and the solution was……
Solution: Plug your monitor into the other output on your video card! Read more…
So it’s been a few days since Microsoft unleashed the Wn7 beta on the public. Reluctant at first, I decided to take the plunge. I’m not a fan of dual-booting, but from what I had gathered it was fairly stable, so I decided to use it as my main OS.
Initial observations (aka what anyone would notice within 5 minutes)
Installation is similar to Vista. It’s a little more polished, but no major changes there. Vista was already a right step in the direction away from XP.
Once everything’s said and done and you’re at the desktop though, things are noticably different.
Read more…
Time for a reformat, and instead of Vista, I decided to put XPÂ on this machine this time. To be honest, I had forgotten about some of the installation issues that tend to arise with an aging operating system…
First up, a BSOD right at the beginning of the boot disk install. As it turns out, the particular blue screen is caused when the installer can no longer read from the install disk (or something to that effect). Very quickly, I realized it was due to the dvd-rom drive being SATA. I quickly swapped it with an IDE cd-rom drive, and the installer made it to the point of letting me know there were no drives detected to install XP on (I expected this, the drive swap was more-so to make certain it wasn’t a totally separate issue).
In any case, there are 3 options should you happen to be in the same situation as I… Read more…
Alright, I’ve had to do this twice now, and it’s taken a few extra minutes of annoying-ness each time to figure it out, so I’ll put it here. Hopefully it helps someone else. Yes, there’s some background. Skip to the last paragraph if you just want the answer. Read more…
Upon installing Vista x64 on an ASUS P5B-VM SE, there were a couple devices in Device Manager that were missing drivers. The first was for the Attansic L1 Network Card, for which ASUS had a driver on their site. The 2nd was an unknown device. Right clicking and going to Properties showed the location as “Intel(R) ICH8/ICH8R Family LPC Interface Controller – 2810″.
Thinking that maybe the Intel Chipset INF package might have the driver, I installed it. No such luck. Finally, I did a search which brought me to a couple other pages, the biggest help being from a post by d.chatten on ocforums.com, although a hardforum.com post was helpful as well. As it turns out, it’s for a device called the ATK0110 which may have something to do with legacy I/O.
Regardless, the link in the post was broken (asus vs ASUS), so I browsed to Read more…
A couple days ago, I went through the process of installing the Kalyway OSX install on a white box computer. Since then, I’ve tried on a couple more machines, mixing up the hardware a bit, and have been through about 10 install attempts. None of the installs have gone hitchless, although with enough time and effort put in, they were all workable.
Rather than write an essay for each install, I’ll put the tidbits in point form. If anyone else is installing and running into similar issues, hopefully this will help. Read more…
Some of you may have read my previous experience installing OS X Tiger on “whitebox” computers. I tinkered with it on and off from 10.4.6 to 10.4.8 on various machines but haven’t really played with the new versions until recently.
A couple months ago, I got a hold of a couple installers – iATKOS v1.0i, and the Kalyway 10.5.1 OS X installers. I was doing re-installs of Windows at the time on a few different machines, so I tried the OS X installers to see if things had progressed to the point where it was a simple install-go-and-everything-works sort of thing. It wasn’t (which answered that question), and I didn’t touch it again. Until now that is… Read more…
