Monday, February 21, 2011

Dell Inspiron 1545 "Hackintosh"


My Nephew received a Dell 1545 Inspiron early last year and after playing with it for a couple of months he didn’t like it. He wanted a Mac. So 10 months later his mother got him a MacBook. Of course since I’m the computer guy in the family, I was the one who had ordered them.

So here we have an unused Windows 7 Dell just gathering dust. Lucky for me the Hackintosh community is vibrant and always adding new builds. I’ve done my own fair share as well. I’ve have a MSI Wind netbook running 10.6.3 and a G4 Hackintosh running 10.6.4.

I hadn’t been checking the Hackintosh boards in a while but decided to see what if any success people had with the Dell 1545. And lo and behold there were many. And so another Hackintosh is grown.

So it took me a couple of tries and now I have a working Dell 1545 Hackintosh running 10.6.6. I found out a couple of things as well.

These are my specs:

Intel Core 2 Duo 2.1 Mhz T4300
4GB RAM
320GB HD
Intel 4500HD Integrated Graphics
Dell DW1515 WLAN mini-card

Everything seems to work okay. Sleep works but the display does not turn off. You have to close the lid. Safari seems to always be crashing as well as Chrome. Firefox seems to work okay. I’m going to reinstall again and see how it goes. I’m very happy with the results. It’s pretty much an Vanilla install with a touch of kext adjustments. It’s the most of my other hacks though but this was just a unused notebook gathering dust.

I do want to add a time delay for Chameleon. I don’t always want to press a key to boot. I want it to wait about 10 seconds and then automatically boot into OS X. I’ll look around for the solution. I remember doing it for my MSI Wind and I think my G4 Hack does it as well. I haven’t booted that in a while now.