I’ve been using my hackintosh laptop, a Dell Mini 10v for the past 3 days after installing Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard on it. Here are my first impressions after spending a few hours on it.

1. Performance –  Mac OS X Snow Leopard runs smoothly with just 1GB of RAM for web surfing, email, chat and listening to music. The screenshot above shows what ’s running on the laptop.
2. Battery life – my initial estimates is a fully charged battery can last about 6 hours with wifi and bluetooth on.
3. Wifi – the 802.11n adapter just works.
4. Ethernet – works. Won’t be using this much because wifi is so convenient.
5. Bluetooth – paired with my Sony Ericsson P1i and bluetooth stereo headset without any problem.
6. Screen – 1024×600 feels a bit cramped as I’m used to at least 1280×800 on my MacBook. I turned on the option to automatically hide and show the Dock to have more usable screen space.
7. External VGA – dual display works with my 42″ Philips LCD TV at 1368×768.
8. Keyboard – will take some getting used to as it’s smaller than my MacBook keyboard. Frequently, I hit the wrong keys when touch-typing.
9. Touchpad – the tiny touchpad makes it really difficult to perform two-finger scrolling. Quite often, it’ll register a two-finger click when I was trying to do the two-finder scroll. Very annoying. For one finger operation and tap to click, the touchpad works fine.
10. Audio – speaker and audio output to earphones work. It can also be paired with my bluetooth headset.
11. Mic – works.
12. Sleep and wake – works by closing and opening the laptop screen. Sleep can also be triggered with a short press on the power on/off button. Audio takes longer (about 15 seconds) to be automatically turned back on after waking from sleep. Wifi and bluetooth wakes up faster.
13. Webcam – tried out Photo Booth with it. Works except Photo Booth’s window is too tall to be displayed entirely on the 1024×600 screen.
14. SD Card Reader - works.

As you can see, all the hardware components in the Dell Mini 10v works with Mac OS X Snow Leopard. I am very satisfied with my Dell Mini 10v as my hackintosh laptop. I highly recommend the Mini 10v to anyone looking for a netbook sized hackintosh laptop.

first impression, snow leopard hackintosh