Mac on a Dell Laptop

Dell Inspiron Laptop - For Mac OS X?

Dell Inspiron - For Mac OS X?

Thought I had seen most everything. Until a few days ago. We got in a Dell Inspiron 1520 laptop with Mac OS on it. OS X 10.6 was installed. Interesting. Whoever had it obviously had spent some time on it getting it to work. Had MS Office on it, several Adobe web dev apps. Overall pretty nice.

Sadly I updated the 10.6 Mac OS – the updates were numerous – and it rendered it inoperable. This however introduced some sort of issues rendering the little laptop that could into the little laptop that couldn’t. My hackintosh just sat there and didn’t go any further than the initial boot screen.  Drat it. My guess is that while I know the Mac OS was not really ever designed to run ON a Dell laptop (or anything other than legitimate Apple hardware) with the OS X architecture running on more mainstream Intel procs and motherboards, we will likely see more of this. However, it’s still not quite compatible with mainstream PCs.  I doubt it ever will be completely.

I’m actually sad that we updated it. I was rather enjoying the Mac experience. I had an issue with the wireless lan card initially which led to the updates. Wouldn’t seem to enable no matter what I tried. Flipped it over and reseated the card and then when I got technician George to take a look at it the next morning, it was working fine.  However, once the network was kicking, that’s when the Mac updates started kicking in and applying. And after that is when we got to the gray screen and it just sat there.

I had technician Joe take a look at it – and he made me laugh.  I called him up from the road to see what kind of results he’d had trying to figure out what was going on with the Hackintosh.  He said something along the lines of, “everything that I have read says that it might be third party memory causing an issue. Does it have third party memory in it?”  I don’t think I laughed out loud, but mentioned that yes, there WAS third party memory in there – there’s actually 3rd party EVERYTHING in that machine as Mac OS is designed to run on Apple hardware and NOT a Dell laptop. I’m still chuckling over that one.

 It doesn’t look like it would be a killer to do the Mac thing on there and would love to really get into the Mac OS to use on a daily basis at least for a while. There are numerous articles out there on building and running a “Hackintosh”.  Balance that out with the time though (even if it’s technically NOT a killer) and  I’m still debating whether to try to take it back to a running version of OS X or just slap on the original Vista (or MAYBE Windows 7) to it.

Opinions?

Author: Eric Erickson

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