How to build your own Mac - part 2
This week, I’m writing two smaller articles. Don’t forget to read my article on Microsoft’s Office 2008 for Mac. Now onto the article.
A couple of months ago, I decided to build my own Mac as a side-project because I was a little underwhelmed with the performance of the new iMac I had bought. The iMac design was fantastic, and the price was decent considering the 24″ monitor that comes with it, but I needed something that allowed for more flexibility with the hard drives. HighDef video editing eats up a lot of space, and it’s not always practical or efficient to have a bunch of external drives. The Mac Pro was WAY out of my price range, so I built my own “almost Mac Pro”. I was so pleased with the results, I am using the Hackintosh full time now. It has been running almost flawlessly since I built it. I thought this would be a good time to follow up and let everyone know what issues I ran into so far, and give a few more instructions on getting the most out of your Frankenstein Mac.
First, let’s start with the little issues I’ve come across so far.
Multi-user:
I’m not entirely sure if this issue is related to the Hackintosh I built, or if there’s something else (drivers?) at play, but switching users often caused the current user to quit. The Mac OS comes with a great “fast user switching” feature that allows several accounts to run on the system at the same time, and switch seamlessly between them. I had an account, and so did my wife; The problem was when my wife would log into her account, sometimes my account would just quit entirely (instead of continuing to run in the background) and vice versa. This isn’t really an issue because I prefer having only one account anyway. Having multiple accounts running simultaneously eats up system resources and slows down the computer. Instead, I’ve set my wife up under my account with her own email program and browser. Problem solved.
No Bluetooth or “real” wireless:
This is not an issue for me because I have no use for Bluetooth, but it may be a concern to some. Since I have no use for it, I will not be looking for ways to make Bluetooth work, but I’m sure there are ways around this if you’re desperate enough. As for the wireless, see below for my workaround.
Updates:
Updating on the Mac is normally easy as pie… unless you have a Hackintosh. There have been two updates so far that could break your Hackintosh. You have to be VERY diligent about not accepting automatic updates unless you are sure they are safe. You have to know what you’re doing to make sure you don’t break anything.
Reboots and startup:
Whenever I have to shut down or reboot, there are precautions I have to take. Performing a shutdown doesn’t entirely shut down the system. The power supply fas stays on, so I must shut down the system from the power supply to cut all power. When restarting (fresh or after a reboot) the system sometimes will not start up. I’m 99% sure this is due to the overclocking (see below for details). I could just bring my system back down to the default settings to avoid the problem, but hey, I like the speed! I can deal with a couple of button presses. If the system doesn’t start on first boot, all I have to do is turn off the power supply and try again. Once it starts loading, it’s perfectly fine again.
That’s it! Everything else has been ROCK SOLID. The system only went down once in 2 months (and I suspect it had a lot to do with me running Windows under Parallels).
As promised in the original article, I mentioned a few extra things that can be done to make your system a little better.
Overclocking:
Even though you only bought a Quad 2.4Ghz CPU, you can make it run at 3.0Ghz with only minor inconsistencies (see “reboots and startup” above). Thanks to the huge CPU heatsink and fan I recommend in my original article, overclocking to 3.0Ghz barely increases heat in the system, and gives a nice speed boost. How you perform your overclocking depends on your motherboard, but the basic idea is you need to boot into your bios setup screen and set the CPU clocking to manual. Then you increase the bus speed of your motherboard, the voltage to the CPU and maybe the ram, and perform a few other tweaks. For a more detailed guide, see here.
Wireless:
With the recent purchase of our new home, I needed to make some preparations for the wireless computing and audio setup I will be building. I upgraded my wireless network to an Airport Extreme (wireless N) with a wireless G bridge network. Since I will not have network cable access in the computer room upstairs in the new house, I needed to go wireless, and wanted to go Wireless N. I bought a NewerTech PCI Wireless N card from OWC. I popped it in, installed the drivers, and it works like a charm. Unfortunately, it does not get detected as an official Apple Airport card, so I don’t have the cool wireless GUI that normal Macs have. I have to setup and connect to my wireless network through the software that came with the card (and it is REALLY ugly and clunky, but it works). The updated drivers were hard to find, but can be found via Google. I now have Wireless N working perfectly.
Essential software:
If you need to download torrents (for TV shows or other) I recommend Azureus. It’s a great package that works well. For MSN chatting, I recommend Adium or aMSN instead of the Microsoft version* (unless you are also using Microsoft Office 2008 for Mac and your chat sessions are for work). Your Hackintosh will not include the iLife suite by default like a real Mac would have. iLife is a great software suite. You can buy it from any Mac retailer for cheap, and it is highly recommended for the full Mac experience. Skype should be the next download. It is free, and allows you to do full audio and video chat with anyone on Mac, Linux or PC. If you need to do any file transfers for web development, Transmit is the best FTP client available. Finally, Toast is an indispensable CD/DVD burning application. It does everything from audio CDs, to data DVDs, to disc images, to video DVDs.
That’s all for this week. Don’t forget to read my other article this week, and stay tuned for next week’s article on building the perfect iHome.
A7
Tags: apple, build, hackintosh, issues, mac, osx, overclocking, wireless
April 5th, 2008 at 4:23 am
First, thanks for such a great article and some of have some clue what you may well have gone through to get things right. It has given me the confidence to take your list to a local expert and see what we can come up with.
I am a web developer totally in love with Ruby and getting along ok with Rails and liking it more with time. The Rails developers are Mac fans so it seems that OSX Leopard is the way for me to go - and therefore the drang for this project.
And finally, before I return to my corner of cyberspace I just want to mention that I’ve been privileged to play with Art and Computers for some 12 years now. Have NOT been able to turn it into a successful “business” but did get a couple of interesting, IMHO, things accomplished. One has been to design and build my own CNC / plotter table. The thing sees phenomenally price worthy and it has allowed me to mess with a dispensing “metal salts”* on ceramic surfaces. What is so cool about this is that a common metal such as say Iron can do amazing things with texture and more than color. I’m “semi-retired” to NE Wisconsin (Door County) which has been terrific BUT is not the business hub for anything - every stupid project could almost be a business but since every project pulls things in another direction the whole thing makes little economic sense.
I’m mentioning all this because you are in a nice area and as things are my whole project is sitting in my closet as I’m not willing to move or change my lifestyle too much to make this a business YET I know it is there… and all the software I wrote could do things nobody has ever done before - like full walls of ceramic surfaces.
Thanks again,
George