My DELLintosh

Not long ago I began having some trouble with my windows XP installation. It'd been about 6 months since I received my Dell XPS machine with XP media center pre-installed on it. As is normal with windows installs and the way I use my computer 6 months is the usual time frame it takes for the system to become cluttered, slow and in this case.. dead. Yes, for whatever reason XP simply refused to boot. And after several attempts to repair the damaged system files I decided it was time for clean sweep '07. Without much time to waste I decided I would get windows XP installed again (the 64-bit flavor this time) and try to get OS X working on another partition.

Windows:
I didn't expect to receive any resistance from windows but I had to do much fiddling to get the windows installer to recognize the newly installed hard drive that I chose to install my new OS' on. Aside from that, the windows install went smoothly. After install, I was lacking 3 important drivers; Ethernet, Graphics and Sound. Sound was remedied by a visit to Dell's website and a download of the original driver for the system. Ethernet drivers were also quickly attained from Intel's website. Working drivers for the GeForce 6800 were a little harder to find. The obvious place to find nVidia drivers would be their website but several attempts into getting their xp64 drivers working left me with a resolution of 800x600 and 8 bit color. Eventually I found some drivers from 2005(!) that worked and a few rounds of HL2DM told me that they were stable enough. Neato, I've got windows.

OS X:
What was unknown territory for me has apparently been familiar to the people @ the osx86 project for some time. Like any smart noob, I did as much reading as I could before setting out on my journey to mac land. I found some useful torrents that I'd be needing along my way, one of which was a how to guide that gave me some general pointers. Yes, with my partition in place and DVD in hand I decided I would accept the paddling that any windows->mac convert must get.

Installation of OS X began very similar to the installation of windows; trouble recognizing something. The solution in the case of OS X was to simply set the DVD as the primary boot device. I saw a lot of text flying up the screen and was shortly greeted with the installation dialogs for OS X. Like windows, I formatted a partition of my boot drive with the native file system. The rest of the installation proceeded without incident. When I reset the system I was expecting to be greeted by my shiny new desktop but instead I was greeted by the Gray Screen of Death. As it turns out, this was not anyone's fault but my own. During the installation I had checked some options that I didn't need to and OS X was loading the wrong graphics drivers. Once I took care of that I was greeted by the not-so-familiar look of OS X, complete with internet access! OS X was now 1-up on windows since it would be much easier to troubleshoot the lingering issues with access to my precious interwebs. The two things left to sort out were a sound driver and graphics drivers that would support my dual display setup. Much like windows, it took some minor fiddling to get the graphics drivers working, though in OS X I got to do this through the terminal which easily added +3 to my leet factor. Lastly I needed to get my audio working and luckily enough the forum's crappy search engine pointed me in the right direction. Ta-daaaa. I now had my very own fully functional DELLintosh.

Screenshot of my OSX Desktop

Conclusion:
Let's not jump to one just yet. I'll be evaluating how I like my DELLintosh and how well it performs for me over the next few weeks.