Tag Archives: mac

Bars everywhere, menubars that is

Posted on by hisham

The Mac’s quite famous for refined, simple and highly usable design. While some of the design cues found in the original Mac may still work just as well today as they did back in 1984, the single menubar doesn’t. Having a single, unified menubar back when no one had 27″ iMacs or dual-screen desktops was probably a logical, zen-inspired approach. Nowadays, the single menubar can be an annoyance. As for remembering shortcuts, well, that isn’t always practical for apps used infrequently. I did something about it: MenuEverywhere. Click on the screenshot for more information.

‘Tis the season: updating my core i7 hackintosh pro rig to snow leopard

Posted on by hisham

Following my foray into building a Hackintosh Pro earlier this year, here’s a short update plus additional tips to help you folks build one yourself. If you haven’t read it yet, here’s my earlier post on building my rig using a Gigabyte GA-EX58-UD5 motherboard. INSTALLING SNOW LEOPARD The good thing is that Snow Leopard works flawlessly with the build. An even better thing is that digital_dreamer over at InsanelyMac has updated his Standard Retail DVD Install script and has made it Snow Leopard compatible. Go on over there and read up. OVERCLOCKING AND PERFORMANCE VS A REAL MAC PRO Although there are some that have managed to get a pretty stable overclock at 4.0GHz on the i7 920, my little experiments have led me to a stable 3.72GHz overclock and well within a reasonable temperature range of 40C to 70C (70C being under heavy load). This is a 40% increase in GHz over the stock speed of 2.66GHz. Considering the Hackintosh Pro is 40% cheaper than a similar Mac Pro and is 45% faster based on Geekbench scores, I’d say the Hackintosh route makes way [...]

The apple of my eye: building my core i7 hackintosh pro rig

Posted on by hisham

A Snow Leopard follow up to this post is here. A couple of months ago I built a quad-core Mac Pro equivalent “Hackintosh” based on Intel’s X58 and Core i7. All components were selected for their compatibility with Mac OS X Leopard. My goal was to build as close a Mac Pro clone as possible using off the shelf parts, with the ability to do Apple Software Updates on a retail, unmodified OS X installation as you would with a real Mac. First though, a little background… BIRTH OF A DELLINTOSH For five years I’ve used a trusty Dell Optiplex GX280. It’s a 3Ghz Pentium 4, Hyper-Threading system. I’ve never had any issues with it which probably had something to do with the fact that I’d stuck with Windows XP Pro throughout and didn’t bother “downgrading” to Windows Vista. From video editing using Sony Vegas to Photoshop usage, the system was rock solid and stable. Back in August of 2008 I jumped on the Hackintosh bandwagon by installing OS X on it. To test out whether my Dell works with OS X, I got hold [...]