Hi from the UK

[bikermondo]

Hi there. I've been a mac owner and user for some time, well since 2009 and the Aluminium MacBook, but after a friend's run in with Apple Support (yes we promise to fix that free of charge, oh wait no we won't) we wondered whether an old D630 from two thousand and something that I'd stuck an Apple sticker on in jest would actually run OSX after all.  It's a Core2Duo so we may be in with a chance

 

So here starts my journey into Hackintosh 'ownership'.  I've got the retail disk for SL (and restore USB's for Lion and ML) and hacked around with hardware and building PC systems for a few years running both Windows (mostly XP and SBS) and Linux (Redhat and Ubuntu) so I'm hoping that I might be able to get Darwin and OSX running sorta-natively-ish on the old Dell in a week or so (famous last words).

 

Like most people here I like OSX but Apple's silly prices (a £1,000 premium over an equivalent Stinkpad? - errrrrrr, no thanks) and some real flakey hardware (lets just leave the glue gun at home for once Mr Ive?) mean Apple won't be getting any dosh for new hardware in the near future.  So here I am - looking to learn new things, play around, get frustrated with my own mistakes and hopefully not turn an old faithful XP laptop into a 3 kilo paperweight.

 

I'll try not to ask dumb questions and that my poking around on these boards will find all the answers I need. So thanks in advance to all the much smarter hackers who have gone before, worked out how to do all the stuff I'm about to try, and been awesome enough to share their knowledge with us all.

 

Kudos to one and all, and see you around!

Mondo

[Hervé]

Hi and welcome.

 

The D630 is one of the easiest platform to turn into a Hackintosh. You'll find all you need on the Web site's pages, not just the forum. Start at the EDP pages where you will find documentation, procedure, bootpacks (you'll need to choose the right one), compatibility table, etc. Then you can read-up the D6xx pages of the forum.

 

You'll find that Snow Leopard runs exceedingly well and exceedingly fast on a D630. Just remember that Intel wireless cards are incompatible with Mac OS X and that, to date, there's no solution to get PCMCIA port working well along all the other hardware. For the rest, it's 100% operational.

 

Note that our recommended installer creation solution (i.e. myHack © by Conti) works only with retail versions of Mac OS X. Anything else will fail as only retail versions have all the files required for installation from scratch.

 

Have a go and let us know how it went.

[bikermondo]

Hi and welcome.

 

The D630 is one of the easiest platform to turn into a Hackintosh. You'll find all you need on the Web site's pages, not just the forum. Start at the EDP pages where you will find documentation, procedure, bootpacks (you'll need to choose the right one), compatibility table, etc. Then you can read-up the D6xx pages of the forum.

 

You'll find that Snow Leopard runs exceedingly well and exceedingly fast on a D630. Just remember that Intel wireless cards are incompatible with Mac OS X and that, to date, there's no solution to get PCMCIA port working well along all the other hardware. For the rest, it's 100% operational.

 

Note that our recommended installer creation solution (i.e. myHack © by Conti) works only with retail versions of Mac OS X. Anything else will fail as only retail versions have all the files required for installation from scratch.

 

Have a go and let us know how it went.

 Thanks for the welcome and all the pointers.  You are spot on when you say the D630 is easy - my Hackintosh is up and running with Snow Leopard in a few hours!  To be honest the longest part was reading through the instructions and building the USB install drive from my old SL family pack install DVD. 

 

Thanks for the heads up on the Intel wireless issue - luckily the D630 has a Broadcom chipset and so set up has been a piece of cake with myHack and EDP.  It's been easier (and quicker) than installing/reinstalling XP on it and much much easier to get all the functionality up and running than any Linux distro was.

 

Serious Kudos to everyone who has worked on making all this possible.  I am deeply impressed!