Hackintosh 10.5.8 vs Windows 7

by on Feb.01, 2010, under Tech Blog

Those of you who know me, will attest to the fact that for years I was a strong anti mac person. I believe that was because I had limited real experience with them other than doing some minor networking, and the enormous pricing of some of the systems. But, due to having an Acer Aspire 3690 that was pretty much junk on Vista, I decided to see how certain systems would run on said machine. Seeing that the laptop was compatabile for Windows 7 and Hackintoshing I decided to do a test run on both systems on the laptop.

For those of you whom haven’t heard of Hackintoshing, some developers have gotten together and using the Intel platform of the new Mac OSx have developed a way to load OSx onto certain PC systems. Not all systems are compatible and one should research their system before attempting an install. I actually recommend using two seperate drives as that way you don’t destroy a working OS, in favor of a non working.

The first thing I did was pull out my Windows 7 Ultimate Signature Edition and load it in the Acer, install time took roughly an hour and a half. After running the various tweaks and updates, I had a Windows 7 pc that would load start to finish in under two minutes. The usability of the system was far better than Vista and flashier than XP. The native core Windows programs were there sucha as (Wordpad, Paint etc.) and it seemed to load most of my drivers from the start with the exception being my wireless card. Reliability was good as well, in fact, with the exclusion of taking a little bit longer than I like for the IE to open and constantly asking if I am sure I want to do something, I found it to be a likeable system.

Now most of my PC loving friends are breaking out the warm fuzzies and are loving the Windows 7 review, however they may wish to break out the tissues as I move on to the Mac portion.

I then tried the latest Hackintosh software for my computer using IatKos v7. Now, using it only gives you 10.5.7 but I have been using 10.5.8 at work. The install was very easy and took about 45 minutes. What I rather liked was that I could pick out the drivers at the start up, and formatting the drive was done in under a minute. After loading up I had to get used to the navigation but found that the manuevering on said system was way easier than using the Windows 7. When I told the OS to do something, It did it! Native programs are far better as well. OSx even comes incorporated with a Dictionary, and a really nice text editor that I would run beside Word any day. Installing my network printer was a breeze as well, with OSx finding it almost immediately compared to 7′s having to look for it online (Did I mention the native drivers are in 7??? And still it had to search online, and took around 5 minutes to pull down). The start up time is roughly 45 seconds and the experience as a whole was far more less taxing.

Windows 7 is great, but I feel that for now I will be Hackintoshing a lot of my systems. The sleekness and usability has won a new convert to the Macintosh side .