In my ever continuing Hackintosh adventures, we find ourselves with what every Mac hacker drools over and dreams of: a $200 ‘Mac Pro’ fully updated with all the latest Apple goodies on par with the real mac owners who’ve spent thousands of dollars for the ability to take their computer to AppleCare.
In my two months of heavily using my Hackintosh (or Poor Man’s Mac Pro) at work where we design and develop websites and web applications, I found my computer blazing away running all the popular design applications including Adobe Photosho CS3 after taking the plunge and installing the Leopard Graphics Update for Mac OS X 10.5.2.
I was very hesitant about installing anything that said “graphics” on it. The worst nightmare of any Mac hacker is rendering his or her computer unable to boot to the Aqua GUI. It was a mixed bag of reviews on the usual forums about what improvements this update held for us running illegal versions of Mac OS X on Intel and AMD. After getting really fed up with the slowness of Photoshop, I used Carbon Copy to make a duplicate of my installation on another hard drive and I updated my Hackintosh.
To my amazement, everything worked! I’m still using Natit to support my 128MB eVGA GeForce 5200FX but it took the Graphics Update without a hitch and now everything appears to be running a lot faster including many applications and games. I don’t know all the details of this update but it’s one to run if your computer’s crawling.
Just in case you haven’t followed my other article on my Hackintosh adventures, I started my Leopard installation using Mac OS X 10.5.1 (Kalyway) found on your neighborhood torrent site with the Kalyway 10.5.2 Combo Update also found online which included, among other things, the new Darwin 9.2.0 kernel. My ‘Mac Pro’ is an Intel Celeron 3GHz (2.93GHz) 340D on a PCChips M925 motherboard using the on-board Realtek 10/100 Ethernet, an eVGA 128MB GeForce 5200FX ($30 on eBay!), and I’m amazingly getting by with a single stick of 512MB PC2400 RAM.
Rumor has it that Cougar will be the new 10.6 release of Mac OS X but we’re only at 10.5.2 right now so you’ve got time to enjoy a fully-working system before we dive into another major release. Apple has trademarked both Cougar and Lynx, so there are more great things to come from the Cupertino-based company.
Here’s a screenshot of what I’m talking about.
January 19th, 2009 at 12:06 PM
With 512 MB ram you can run Photoshop CS3? Thats really amazing. Cool.
I installed on my home pc (also 512mb) but even with a old version (CS) the computer was very slow.