OSNews

I hear ya. As a paying customer of Apple for God knows how long (actually... since System 7.5.x days, casual user since 7.0.x), I felt kind of entitled to take a walk on the grey area and check out how the "Hack OS X" would run on the refurbished HP laptop I bought earlier this year. While keeping the iMac with the bought copy of Tiger shut down, of course, so my shade of grey remains as light as possible. </tongue-in-cheek>

Apart from not supporting the memory card reader and the Intel 3945ABG adapter, it works almost great. QE/CI works with Titan/Natit/LD (strange combination, but necessary to enable dithering on the 6-bit LCD), although the display blacks out if sleep is enabled, and won't come up again unless I manage to put the entire system to sleep and force it to come back.

But what surprises me is how cool the laptop remains during regular use, whereas under Vista (which came bundled, Home Premium) it gets really hot, really quick, then the fan goes crazy. Which prompted me to buy one of those aluminium laptop stands with a pair of fans. I have to use NHC (http://www.pbus-167.com/) to force Vista to use the battery-optimised settings and keep the processor at minimum frequency. HP's default settings don't work well at all, still I don't want to disable its settings, then Vista, so wisely, doesn't show the battery-optimised settings anymore. Brilliant, Microsoft. Under OS X I don't even need to enable the battery-saving options... Not to mention how there's no UAC to first inform me that on the coming screen I'll have to allow some app I just downloaded to run, then proceed to the next nagscreen telling me to finally allow it to run... o_O


I'm piling up some cash to get myself a 17" MacBook Pro mid-2008, when the Penryn mobile version is out. One thing that this HP laptop taught me is that debugging on 1280x800 is a pain; I'm so eyeing the 1920x1200 BTO MBP, preferably with LED-backlit goodness

Edited 2007-10-21 20:05