Hackbook – a little experiment
A little experiment of trying to run OS X on a cheapo laptop
Prerequesites:
Dell 1490 Mini-PCI wireless card (Ebay is your friend)
Candidate number 1 – Acer Aspire 2920
Older little laptop that’s small in size and a perfect candidate. Changing the wireless card was simple with this one. It has a cover underneath that’s easily unscrewed. OS X worked. It worked quite well. But I wasn’t happy with the LCD quality on this one. The dark colours were dithered when watching DVDs and Youtube videos. Other than that it worked perfectly.
Candidate number 2 – LG R405-G
This one wasn’t bad either. It installed flawlessly. The one problem was that there was no bottom cover to take off and I couldn’t figure out how to take apart this laptop. So I couldn’t replace the wireless card. Luckily I found a driver on Ralink’s site that worked with OS X on this one. One problem was the display quality (again). Another was that it would boot into a black screen sometimes. So this one was a no go.
Watch video here:
Candidate number 3 – HP DV2000 (DV2700)
This one was hell. Wireless card was easy to change BUT (and a big but) it was blacklisted (or not whitelisted) in the laptop’s BIOS. The thing wouldn’t boot unless you used the original wireless card. I tried (many times) to hack the BIOS and add the Dell 1490 to the whitelist from all the suggestions I found on the web. It didn’t work. Still wouldn’t boot and complained the card is not supported. I ended up wrecking the BIOS. The laptop wouldn’t even show anything on boot. I had to get a USB stick and use the built in procedure to restore the original BIOS to get the laptop to boot again. Fun times. This one was by far the worst.
Conclusion
It’s really not worth the trouble. OS X may or may not run on a cheap PC laptop, but not everything will work as it should. Number 1 would be my choice if it wasn’t for the crappy LCD quality.
End result (ta da)
Saved up and got the real thing. What an idea! After playing with it for few weeks I am convinced that they are worth the price. I didn’t see any corners cut when this thing was designed.
