Success Report: 100% Functional OSX86 Laptop for only $500

[fakebanana]

Following skippyretard's report of his experience with the HP DV1708NR, I bought one off ebay for about $475 and installed a 1gb DDR2 chip I had lying around.

 

After repartitioning, reformating, and reinstalling windows (finding all of the drivers was a little tricky), I followed this popular installation guide using the JaS 10.4.6 installation disc (I formated the mac partition initally as a primary FAT32 partition.) I selected the SSE3 patches and the Wireless Internet options in the custom installation options. Afterwards, I had no trouble booting OSX, but Acronis didn't want to boot windows anymore. I booted from the windows installation disk and used the fixboot and fixmbr commands, and then removed Acronis since I could switch between booting from Windows and OSX from the OSX bootloader.

 

Then it was time to get all of the hardware working. The Intel GMA 950 graphics worked perfectly for me without making any modifications, including OpenGL, Core Image, QE, etc. without having to resort to moding the VGA port. After each modification I made, I'd reboot to test if my fix had made the hardware function properly.

 

To get the sound working, I followed the instructions here and added 0x27d880086 to the IOPCIPrimaryMatch key in the /System/Library/Extensions/AppleAzaliaAudio.kext/Contents/Plugins/AppleAzaliaController.kext/Contents/info.plist, removing AppleHDA.kext. In my testing I discovered that the recent Parallels Workstation beta load with sound disabled, but the Parallels 1.0 release works fine with sound enabled.

 

The wireless loaded during installation, so I hoped that it would work without any effort. Unfortunately, I had to make a few more minor modifications. I read that I had to do an en0/en1 swap. What this entailed was going into /Library/Preferences/SystemConfiguration/NetworkInterfaces.plist and changing the string en0 under the key BSD Name to en1 and the key IOInterfaceUnit from 0 to 1. However, I suspect that if I had got the ethernet working beforehand that this change may have been done automatically.

 

To get the ethernet working I had to modify /System/Library/Extensions/IONetworkingFamily.kext/Contents/PlugIns/AppleIntel8255x.kext/Contents/Info.plist. Apparently all Intel Pro 10/100 VE are not the same. In my case, I had to add the string 0x10928086 to the IOPCIMatch key. I got the proper value by booting into windows and checking the vendor id, device id in the device manager, although there is probably an equivalent way to do this within OSX.

 

Having the devices all functioning properly, I moved on to install the JaS 10.4.7 update without incident and load the rest of Apple's updates using Software Update. Then I installed the power management kext to get battery without any problem.

 

I attempted to install CPU Throttler unsuccessfully. Apparently the Celeron M processor in this laptop has Speedstep permanently disabled, which is unfortunate because this generation of laptops tend to to run hot. In fact, I discoverd when running a burn-in that the laptop will actually crash eventually due to thermal overload. However, for some reason the system governing how often the cooling fan turns on is reset after sleep; it seems to be scheduled to run fro 30 seconds every minute or so. Anyways, I've been running the CPU & graphics at 100% for over three days now but I've been unable to get the laptop to crash if I've put the laptop to sleep at some point first. BTW, it does sleep properly and quickly with with no issues on wake.

 

Another quirk that I've encountered is that outgoing packets to my linux server connected through my Hawking Technologies 802.11g router sometimes get dropped if I've setup the network with WPA encryption. I've verified can still communicate with other machines on the network and the network routes seem unchanged so it's a puzzling problem. Other forms of network encryption seem to work as expected.

 

Here my Xbench (1.3) scores for the curious:

 

Overall 68.45 CPU 53.13 Thread 81.75 Memory 73.45 Quartz 79.79 OpenGL 154.20 UI 130.96 Disk 32.31

 

I think it compares pretty favorably to my last mac laptop that I bought for about the same price (a 600Mhz G3 IBook) at 13.29 Overall :-)

 

Parallels performance was also better than I expected considering the lack of dual core and VT technology. Comparing running SiSoft Sandra on identical disk images natively and under Parallels on both the laptop and my 3.4 Ghz Pentium D Hackintosh (VT enabled) revealed a commensurate ratio between native mode and Parallels performance on either platform.

 

I clocked battery life at 1.76 hours on the standard 6 cell battery with wireless on, full brightness etc., which is roughly what I'm seeing on the Windows end so I'm happy with that. With the 12 cell battery I'd expect to get upwards of 3 hours.

 

So overall I think this is a great machine for someone looking for a discount Intel Mac Laptop with everything working properly. However, I'm not happy about the heat. Like the Macbooks, I think it's too hot to use in your lap and a little uncomfortably warm to type on. I'll keep on with it for another week, but I might end up Ebaying it (I'll post here first!).

[guiyoforward]

AWSOME report. many thanks!!!

 

is there anything similar with 17 inches and a core/sse3 processor?

[wondergod]

i have a dv1520 which is very similar to yours...

 

i noticed 2 things...when i first installed my spot light kept crashing and trying to reopen and caused my pc to generate a lot of heat from all the work the processor was doing...after reinstalling osx it resolved that...so you may want to check your console logs...

 

also after that I installed the throttle kext and then cputhrottler gui and my cpu throttled fine...after a while i stopped opening the cputhrottler gui all together and my pc was fine....i dunno if its because it auto throttles(i don't think so) or if it auto steps or just runs it at a lower speed automagically all I know is I can leave my laptop on all day long without opening cputhrottler and no heat problem....

[fakebanana]

i have a dv1520 which is very similar to yours...

 

i noticed 2 things...when i first installed my spot light kept crashing and trying to reopen and caused my pc to generate a lot of heat from all the work the processor was doing...after reinstalling osx it resolved that...so you may want to check your console logs...

 

also after that I installed the throttle kext and then cputhrottler gui and my cpu throttled fine...after a while i stopped opening the cputhrottler gui all together and my pc was fine....i dunno if its because it auto throttles(i don't think so) or if it auto steps or just runs it at a lower speed automagically all I know is I can leave my laptop on all day long without opening cputhrottler and no heat problem....

 

I checked my system.log and all of the gziped archives as well as the crashreporter.log - I don't think I see a log of any spotlight crashes. What should I be looking for?

 

I googled dv1520 and I think your laptop has a Pentium M processor, which has speedstep enabled. My laptop has a Celeron M, which AFAIK means no throttling for me. When I try to load the throttle kext (either version) I get an error code "No valid CPUs returned by ACPI", which is consistent with the information on the Celeron M I found on Intel's website and other Celeron M users on the forums. There may be some other way of controlling the fan and/or throttling the processor though <crossed-fingers>

[wondergod]

ya it is a different chip sorry i was thinking of the celeron in my desktop...my bad...

 

you may not necessarily have spotlight crashing...but you can check to see if anything is crashing in utilities-> console and look through the different logs there...

 

 

btw you can try to upgrade to a core solo(at your own risk of course)

 

http://forum.insanelymac.com/index.php?sho...amp;hl=core+duo

 

for cputhrottler you installed that kext that it needs right?

[rogabean]

Decent laptop for the price.

 

I would toss a Core Solo at the very least in it... (the T1350 will fit... if you want to go Core Duo the T2250 is a good choice)

 

The Core CPU's that end with 50 are 533FSB.

 

This will give you a decent step up from the stock CPU and more features.

 

If only this thing had a DVD burner I would have chosen it over my Gateway.

[Winternacht]

I don't have keyboard or trackpad on my dv1708nr. I am using a usb mouse to get around, and it was working the first time I loaded but after a reset I lost it.

 

Error:

 

System extension cannot be used

 

"/system/librarty/extensions/ApplePS2Controller.kext" was installed improperly and cannot be used.

[paulicat]

Try not to hijack threads, but to fix your problem, do a:

sudo chown -R root:wheel /System/Library/Extensions/*

in terminal, then reboot.

[SquidCombo]

Dude, is this the listing that you won?

 

http://cgi.ebay.com/HP-pavillion-dv1708nr-...2QQcmdZViewItem

[fakebanana]

No. Actually this was the auction I won.

 

I've decided that my desktop hackintosh is sufficient for my needs though, so I've put the laptop up on Ebay

[whodiini]

Here's a simple and brilliant way to fix the overheating problem. REMOVE the temperature plugin by deleting the AppleACPIThermal.kext from inside the AppleACPIxxxxx.kext, where xxxxx is Family or equivalent. This means that the motherboard will take over the thermal management. I tried it and using Temperature Monitor application, whenever it gets to 40 degrees C, the fan turns on until it gets to 32 C. Works like a champ. Kudos to http://paulicat.freeflux.net/ for the idea. I dont understand at all, but this laptop with a 1.4 Celeron is faster (my perception using it) than my macbook core duo! I actually liked it so much I went ahead on bot the Apple. I still like the HP better, except that it doesnt have a webcam built in.

[dooododoo]

fakebanana>>

 

are you saying that your laptop can go to sleep and wake up successfully? when i put my laptop to sleep and wake it up, everything will turn on except the display backlight. can you tell me how you were able to make a success sleeping and waking up laptop? thanks in advance.