Hackintosh: My Hackbook Mini 10v
This Christmas I received the fantastic little laptop that everyone has been talking about - the Dell Mini 10v. I dual booted it with Snow Leopard and Windows 7 Ultimate. A project that required much less effort than I thought it would require. This was thanks to a superlative guide, edited from an amalgamation of several guides, but damn easy to read and clear to follow. The link to that guide is here. The guide was created in late December 2009 and updated again early this year.
Information in the guide was extremely up to date, including a wonderful new discovery I made: If you intend to install Snow Leopard on your new Dell Mini 10v, you no longer need worry about downgrading the BIOS to AO4, you can keep it at AO6! This is thanks to the ingenious creators of Netbookmaker and Netbookinstaller. If you have read other guides - particularly the popular gizmodo guide - you will know that reverting the BIOS to a previous version was a mandatory process to making your Hackbook. There was a possibility of bricking the computer. It was probably the biggest factor hindering my attempt to hack my own netbook. Now that bricking was no longer a factor, I dove right into making my dual boot hackbook mini.
My hackbook fits into my geek life well. It provides me with a myriad of uses both productive and not. Its a second computer - no doubt I fit into the category of most netbook users - and as a second computer I’ve used it to enhance the use of my primary computer, and use it as a replacement in some cases. My hackbook enjoys interacting with my local network. I access my saved shows over the network, and work I do on the hackbook I easily save to my network for access on my main computer. This may give away more about my laziness than I care to admit, but it’s really fun to connect through screensharing to my Macbook Pro 17” while on my netbook in order to switch to the next episode of whatever show I’m watching. Even if I’m only three feet away.
I’ve also had no trouble using a number of different applications from my macbook pro on my mini. Chopper is a game that runs nicely on the hackintosh. Another is Quinn, a tetris clone that has very smooth graphics, and has practically zero memory footprint. Neither game is particularly taxing, and Quinn is resizable which makes it fun to play while watching a show on VLC. (Yes I’m totally ADD.) If you’re into something more taxing, then get yourself the Diablo II boxset and use your other mac as a remote CD player and install the full package on your hackintosh - download the full (and legal!) patch to make it run without a CD - and you have a functional and addictive game to play!
For more productive tasks, like adding content to this site, I’ve been using Scrivener, which is like a virtual binder that lets me write as well as store images, links, video and music so I can structure everything well. I also use littlesnapper to take screenshots. And if I have no ability to concentrate I use writeroom. The keyboard is actually quite fun. It is a full size keyboard, but I find that I have better maneuverability around the keyboard because my wrists rest much closer to the keys than when I type on my macbook pro. Typing is fun! The trackpad is another story. Its a pile of shit, and no amount of driver code seems to change that. I have myself a tiny portable mouse made by targus, it works well and is great for a 10inch screen. Its tiny - too small for big hands - but makes up for in ooohs and aaahs that it gets from passersby. It also has a retractable chord.
On the mac side of things, I did encounter some glitches - that others have fixed! Silverlight for mac does a processor check during the installation and when it discovers the atom processor, it thinks you’re using a powerpc processor. This makes it impossible to watch Netflix online on the hackintoshed mini. A very decent gentleman from the website www.michaelhong.com has released silverlight installer that bypasses the cpu check. Voila, Netflix on your hackintosh. Now, I’ve included that release here for you to download because his site appears to be down. Sleep gives me trouble, and I haven’t fixed it yet. Mostly due to laziness. The fix available from this list of repairs doesn’t work on my machine. So I’m going to find my way around that problem.
This was a dual boot, so I should tell you about the Windows 7 partition. It starts up quickly and runs fast. I would say its marginally faster than snow leopard actually. I have used Windows XP in bootcamp and most of my experience with windows has been with XP, but Windows 7 is really fun! I love OS X and I know it well, but I don’t feel bad saying that Windows 7 is a fun OS to use. Granted it has issues like any OS, but its so much better than Vista and its definitely a nice upgrade from XP.
But I only have one reason why I use a Windows 7 partition: The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind. I love this game. Its a huge roleplaying game that came out in 2002. The graphics are relatively low key and it plays without trouble on the mini at the right settings. The game itself is scalable in graphical quality, so on a powerful computer it can look stunning. That is because the game has a great modding community that has transformed the graphics, textures and landscape to enhance the game. While you can’t use the great graphics enhancements on the Dell Mini 10v, you can still uses the mods that add content such as quests, items, weapons, houses and characters.
I’ve read that many people feel guilty after their purchase, not knowing what to really do with a second computer. I use it for a combination of TV, games and writing, beyond the obvious web browsing and skyping. The hackbook is an asset because if I feel the urge to write a paragraph I can whip it out of my bag and just start writing. Its portability enables my creativity. I probably got lucky though - I’ve been reading and reading and reading about this computer for a while. It has given me time to imagine ways to use it.
