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Hackintosh or Mac Mini


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Since my laptop has become less compatible over the time with the SSE2 and iTunes 7 and Graphics and the whole Pentium M thing I've come to a conclusion. So I need your advise I had two options either upgrade the PC (not the laptop), the processor, motherboard, ram and new hard drive and stuff, or buy the 600 dollar Mac mini. Before you guys tell me to get a iMac or MacBook please consider that I am 15 years old and don't have a job. I only get 60 dollars a week for taking care of my nephew. If the upgraded it would be around 300 dollars, 120GB WD hard drive, Cosair valueselect 512MB ram, Intel Pentium D 2.8 Ghz (I've herd bad things about Pentium D, why?), and a ECS 945G-M3 (1.0b) Socket T Motherboard, and 24 to 20 power supply pin thingy. I want to use it for school and maybe recording some tv with some El Gato sutff. So I was wondering if the Intel Graphics Media Accelerator 950 runs OK on a hackintosh, QE, CI, Open GL right, do you get the nice 3D box flip when you change users, nice splash with widgets, do the graphics work (cursor thing I hear about, how about some people saying that QE or something is making their systems crawl?) will it run faster than the Mac mini? I would really appreciate your answers, I'm really tired of the ugly windows programs I want the pretty OS X ones. Thanks for the responses.

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I would save your money and buy a Mac Mini. For one thing you get a fully working Mac OS not a hacked version running an old 10.4.4 kernel. A Hackintosh is OK to test to see if you like the OS but lets face it you will never have it being 100% compatible with the OS. Then you have Leopard coming out soon and currently you can't run it on a Hackintosh until it's hacked but you will be able to run it on a Mini.

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At your age? build yourself Mac Mini at half the price. With the money saved, buy 1 or 2 gig of RAM (your disk drive will never spin, well almost). As far as GMA950 is concerned, you get support from Apple directly.

1. you get to learn how to put a box together.

2. you get to learn how OSX is put together by hacking it

3. you might want to work for Apple when you grow up

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yes .. i agreed, you should get the mini, and an RAM upgrade (1GB i think is enough). and next you can save up some money to buy a nice big and wide LCD (if you havent got one), and maybe you can upgrade to Core 2 Duo processor in the future (i've read some success).

 

that way you can have 100% fully working OS(also Windows with bootcamp), and maybe some experience by getting the C2D into the minis.

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If money is a concern you could always ask your parents to help you get a Apple Credit Account. This way you would only pay a minimum of $19 a month and you would be building up your credit (assuming you can get your name on the account). You could put down the $300 you were planning on using for upgrades and then finance the rest at whatever rate you can afford.

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Thanks might consider it but Im thinking the Mac mini is not worth that much money. I wont get the 300 dollars until the November 13th. One of my friends is interested in buying a computer so I might sell him my old one, 1.8ghz Nvidia 6200 512 ram DVD burner and a 120 gigabyte hard drive sell it for around 250ish then i would have about 500 dollars plus about 200 I'll make during the time It takes to get the money I'll have earned around 700. I could get a Mac mini with 1 GB ram upgrade for 674 or Core 2 duo @ 1.86ghz, GIGABYTE GA-945P-S3, 1 GB of Ram, 120 GB hd and an MSI X1600Pro for 678 dollars. Will the Mac mini be faster ? Leopard is not a really big concern for me.

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The mac mini would be terrible if you ever decide to play games, but the advantages are that ITS A MAC!..includes all the software and will be able to run macos and windows perfectly. But the C2D system you are looking at building will have room later on for easy upgrades..video card...hard drive...etc.. but its all up to you.

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