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A Fantastic Eight Months with a Hackintosh Netbook
0 Comments | Posted by Victor Goh in Blog, MSI, Mac OS X
Charlie Sorrel over at Wired.com Gadget Lab, talks about his 8 months experience with a hackintoshed MSI Wind clone from Medion. His positive experience provides a contrast to Brian X Chen disappointment after 6 months with a hackintosh netbook.
His main reason for his positive experience?
He had low expectations for his Mac netbook. What he had was a rock solid Mac OS X netbook that ran for seven hours on a nine-cell battery and did all the tasks he wanted it to do. He says at the end:
If you are aware from the beginning that a netbook is a cheap, low-spec, low-rent kind of computer, with the cheapest, most plasticky parts, then you won’t be disappointed. And if you hack it to run OS X, and you have similarly low expectations, you’ll actually be pleasantly surprised. I love my hackintosh netbook. It’s not perfect, but is sure is damn useful.
I couldn’t agree more.
The MSI Wind is one of the earliest netbook that got hackintoshed into running Mac OS X. The MSIWind.net discussion forums used to have detailed guides on how to install Mac OS X on the MSI Wind, but MSIWind.net seems to have gone offline. If you’re a MSI Wind owner who wants Snow Leopard on your netbook, all is not lost. You can still find all the info you need for installing Snow Leopard on your MSI Wind at Macwind.x10hosting.com.
To install Mac OS X Snow Leopard on the MSI Wind require 5 things:
- MSI Wind netbook.
- Mac OS X Snow Leopard Retail Disk.
- USB Flash drive with at least 8GB.
- MSI Wind Snow Leopard installer and kext files.
- A Mac computer to create the USB Installer.
You can buy the first 3 items, download item 4 and borrow item 5.
Macwind.x10hosting.com has detailed instructions for building your USB installer and installing a 100% Vanilla Snow Leopard on your MSI Wind. The download links to all the necessary files are included in the instructions.
Here’s a youtube video of Snow Leopard on the MSI Wind.
After six months, Brian X. Chen decides to part ways with his hackintosh laptop, a MSI Wind. The relationship got off to a great start with hopes of love, thrills and delight. So, what turned the MSI Wind from being a great companion device to a frustrating and impractical gadget?
According to Brian, over time, little irritations with the netbook made it increasingly frustrating to use. First, the small trackpad made navigation tiresome and he had to use an external mouse. Second, software utilities hacked to run on his netbook didn’t work perfectly. The netbook’s wifi connection stopped working suddenly while he was on a trip to Europe. I guess it’s related to the quality of kext files (similar to Window’s hardware drivers) for the MSI Wind written by hackers. His third complaint, the build quality of cheap netbooks. His netbook screws fell out and the case no longer clamp shut all the way. All these, caused the battery to pop out slightly whenever he nudged it. When the battery pops out, the netbook shuts down.
In the end, he gave up on his hackintosh netbook, sold it along with his old MacBook Pro and bought a refurbished unibody MacBook.
I have to agree with Brian that a netbook’s small trackpad can be frustrating to use. At times, my Dell Mini 10v trackpad seems to have a mind of its own. Sometimes, it needs some coaxing before the click or two finger scrolling registers properly.
As for the overall hardware and software reliability, the Dell Mini 10v hackintosh laptop is a champ. I’m still thrilled and delighted by it. Let’s see after six months, will I still be saying the same thing. 
