My FrankenDell becomes a Hackintosh

[J Arcane]

I've got a frankenstein machine I put together from the guts of an old Dell Dimension 4600, stuffed inside an Asus TM-211 case (the white version of the same case those "Open Computer" guys are using, bought for a Portal casemod). 2.4ghz P4, Geforce 6600, 1.5GB RAM, nothing super impressive.

 

I'd actually been trying to figure out how I could go about making an OS X cd for my Powerbook from Windows, when it occured to me that it would be a hell of a lot easier to just install OS X on my PC. I'd found an article about the Kalyway disc on Lifehacker a long time ago, but honestly hadn't thought it would work.

 

Well, turns out it did. And quite well. My first install got sort of messed up, because I forgot to install the Nvidia drivers, the sound wasn't working, and my ethernet only seemed to work half the time. A wipe and reinstall however got everything working ship shape.

 

I do have a few niggling issues though:

 

1) I keep getting a "USB overcurrent" message, telling me it's shutting down a hub attached to me machine. Got it a bunch during the install process, and I get it once on boot up every time. This seems to be affecting the usefulness of my USB, as I can no longer hot swap my mouse. If I unplug it, then plug it back in, it doesn't recognize it anymore, and so I have to force a restart of the machine just to use it again. I read something somewhere that suggested disabling USB 2.0 can fix this, but of course my silly Dell motherboard doesn't give me any option for that in BIOS. Anyone know any other work arounds?

 

2) Flash video playback is absolutely terrible. Pixelated, slow, really makes Hulu basically useless in OS X. Miro makes up for YouTube, but that's about it. I'd thought this might be a video issue, but a google check suggest this may just be the fault of OS X Flash plugin being crummy?

 

3) I think OS X did something wierd to my DVD drive firmware, because now every burning software I use, on XP or OS X, reports my available speeds at 2x higher than what I should actually have. I'm not sure what the hell caused that, but it was frustrating me, because the Titanium Powerbook prefers DVDs to be in 4x supposedly, and I couldn't burn in 4x. I wound up getting a CD version of 10.3 anyway, and CD-Rs reported normal speeds. I'm worried this could be a problem in the future though, because it was actually reporting a max speed on my DVD-Rs higher than what the discs are actually rated for!

 

4) Sleep doesn't work. I think this is a video issue. The machine wakes up fine, but there's no signal to the monitor. This isn't a big deal really, because I'm used to Windows, where it never works either, but it did cause me some problems a few times until I finally remembered to actually turn it off.

 

Overall though, I'm really happy with it. I'd gone into it with some trepidation, as I'm an old Classic die hard, and the concept of a UNIX Mac OS seemed wrong to me, but really, in many ways it's even easier to use now than it was in the old days. IT earned a permanent spot on it's own dedicated hard drive, and will not likely leave it any time soon.