Windy and Snowy

Last year during Thanksgiving I bought a MSI Wind netbook knowing that I would make it a Hackintosh. A Hackintosh is installing the Apple Mac operating system on a PC not made by Apple. I wanted something very light and mobile using Mac OS X Leopard and not Windows. I got the idea from msiwind.net, which has gone to cyberspace heaven. The site had a forum where other people had success in putting Leopard on their MSI Wind. One had to be very technical for this to happen because one played with bootloaders, kexts, knowing ones Terminal commands, and other such items. It was a very involved process and sometimes things didn't work out such as the wrong screen resolution and non-working wifi. I had replaced the stock wifi card and put in an apple card that I had gotten from e-bay for use in a project that I was planning and fell through.

After a successful vanilla install, one that uses the original operating system discs, and successful software updates, I left the Wind at Leopard 10.5.6 which was stable to use. For the past year I've been using the Wind without any problems. It's been my little light netbook that I take here and there. Since then, Snow Leopard has been released and msiwind.net went away. In it's rebirth came insanelywind.net which I haven't really kept up to date with. As I was trolling through the forums, Snow Leopard had been successfully installed in the Wind as well and this time it's fairly easy. It's as simple as 1-2-3. This piqued a renewed interest because I had read that installing SL was a little troublesome and would not run too well on the Wind.














Well after reading the forums and downloading the necessary files, I've successfully installed SL on the Wind. All it took was a 8GB USB flash drive, the original SL OS disc, and a couple of installer programs. I was up and running in an hour or so and loaded the latest updates. Everything seems to be running fine and fast. Of course since the Wind has the Atom processor, I'm only using it for light tasks and such. E-mail, web browsing, and word processing won't task the Wind too much. Watching .avi and .mpg files are fine as well. I haven't tried HD files but I'd figure it'd choke on those.

All in all I'm very happy with the final results. Now I'll be helping a friend build his Lifehacker Hackintosh. I was tempted as well but thought better of it. We shall see.