Hackintosh Tales

I’ve never had more than $450 to spend on a computer at any one time, so I built myself a Hackintosh tower a year ago. It gave me a way of trying out Mac OS X without really committing to it, but I’ve found my installation to be rock solid. More so than Windows, even.

I just rebooted from Windows 7, which decided for no apparent reason to start spraying noise patterns all over my screen. I thought Windows Update picked a particularly bad time to start updating the graphics drivers (I was playing Civilization 4) but it turns out that wasn’t the reason. I still don’t know what the reason was, so I simply rebooted. Of course, on this machine, rebooting means clicking the restart button and waiting 15 seconds for Windows to either blue-screen to its death or simply freeze - I can count on one hand the number of times it has shut down properly. Adding Windows updates hasn’t improved the situation at all.

Mac OS? Never had a single graphics glitch with Snow Leopard, and it’s always shut down properly. No kernel panics either. No problems whatsoever past the installation phase (painful though it was, being a hackintosh).

Maybe I should have saved up the money over the years and gotten an iMac with it. Maybe then I’d have a system that would run Windows properly.