armor1 Posted February 14, 2008 Share Posted February 14, 2008 I had some spare parts lying around, so I did some research and bought a Gigabyte motherboard from Fry's for $55, a Celeron for the same amount, and then 2 GB RAM for $40. Total cash outlay was $150, tax not included. I tried installing Tiger and it worked quite well. Video was fully supported out of the box. I already had a $30 USB sound card, so that was a no-brainer. Ethernet didn't work, but it was easy to find a driver on the Internet. Soon I had a fully working Tiger installation. Leopard was next. The Kalyway image I downloaded was corrupted, so I tried ToH instead. The installation went smoothly, but after that it wouldn't boot, perhaps because the kernel expected EFI instead of good old fashion BIOS. Found online instructions about this, and used the -legacy parameter as instructed. After that it came up beautifully. An unexpected bonus was that everything worked right off the bat, no further tweaking required. Sleep didn't work -- could not wake up as many others have found -- but this was no big deal and easily disabled. I installed VMware, then Windows Server 2003 (to be used as workstation), then WindowBlinds, and then the Tiger skin. When used in the Unity mode, this gives me the best of both worlds: the nice, soothing computing environment of the Mac, plus the sharp text and some really good apps on the Windows side, all working seamlessly together. The following are some miscellaneous rants, opinions and observations. Please don't read them and simply ignore me if you may find such things offensive: 1) Leopard's default installation is 10 GB in size. This can be trimmed down by half, but still, if Mac zealots condemn Windows as being bloated, they are not paying enough attention to the beam in their eyes. 2) After starting up and before running any applications, Leopard takes up about 540 MB RAM. The OS may be snappy and responsive -- but lean and mean it sure ain't. 3) Mac font rendering still looks fuzzy at any setting. Font appearance on the Mac used to be far ahead of Windows and Linux. Today it is trailing both. Good thing most people don't have the visual acuity to perceive this particular shortcoming. 4) The OSX86 scene seems to be full of people who whine about not being able to get their machines to work and cry for help every step of the way. I ran into them online everywhere. Paying too much attention to them can make you kind of depressed about the future of humanity. These guys... I mean, there are so many of them, and a lot of them are supposed to be the bright kids. They all want something for nothing, and they are uniformly unable to express themselves in their own native tongue (English) without making tons of errors. If they represent the future, we are doomed. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
carbonite19 Posted February 14, 2008 Share Posted February 14, 2008 Congrats on the installs. Just wanted to give my 2 cents... on your points I'm sure others will get started on this thread... 1) I just want to say that Mac OSX comes with more apps out of the box and I think having all the language pack adds alot as well. Windows generally does not include other languages in it's installs. So I would say Vista is more bloated for it's English to Mac English only. Windows XP was more trim. 2) I would argue that Mac OSX is leaner and meaner than Vista and than a fully loaded (Anti-Virus, Spyware, Firewall and all apps that run on startup) Windows XP (that is unless you know how to do alot of tweaking) 540MB seems pretty low. 3) I agree here Windows with Clear Type has got it right, much crisper on screen text. Mac and Linux definitely trail in this regard. 4) I would guess this is what a forum is for, people do need to have a place to start learning. But I do agree that sometimes people don't search enough for answers and post the same questions over and over. Most forums are like that though, at least computing forums. Anyway, people in the know aren't required to respond to threads they don't want to respond to, and they can help who they want. Doomed? Alot of the written language online is pretty bad, guess people are too used to SMS and Chat..., I agree. (English is my second language) How do I fair... Do you have hope now? Anyway some might be bright in other things than written languages I'll probably get flamed for something I wrote... Let the fun begin Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
JǾ#Ņ Posted February 15, 2008 Share Posted February 15, 2008 why celeron? A cheap 4xxx core2duo should be a perfect match for best price/performance! Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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