Chris Parker's Personal Blog – Flying, sailing and photography, mostly. And gadgets.
Here’s my Dell Mini 9 running Mac OS X Snow Leopard 10.6.1.
I followed the instructions on MyDellMini.com to do the upgrade from Leopard 10.5.7. The internal drive has been upgraded to a RunCore 64GB SSD so the easiest way to upgrade is to remove it, connect it to another Mac via USB, then do all the installations before refitting it in the Mini.
Don’t forget to DISABLE the Legacy USB support in the BIOS to prevent the computer locking up in sleep mode.
If you’re running an Intel-based Mac you should really run out and buy the latest version of Apple’s operating system, Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard.
To learn more, see Apple’s Snow Leopard pages and MacWorld’s extensive coverage. To check that your critical applications will run under the new OS go to the Snow Leopard Compatibility page on snowleopard.wikidot.com.
Although Snow Leopard provides very few new features, it consolidates all the work Apple has done since moving to Mac OS X in 2002. By removing Power PC code and optimising Intel code, the installation is smaller than 10.5 and runs faster. And at only £25 for a single user and £40 for the Family Pack to upgrade from Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard, it shouldn’t be a difficult decision.
If you’re still running Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger your best bet is to buy the Mac Box Set. For £132 you get Snow Leopard, iLife ’09 (iMovie ’09, iPhoto ’09, GarageBand ’09, iWeb ’09, and iDVD) and iWork ’09, Apple’s productivity suite which includes Pages ’09, Numbers ’09, and Keynote ’09.
There’s something of a brouhaha over this report from the BBC.
No Mac advice as BBC team exposes…its Windows-centricity – Digital Lifestyle – Macworld UK
I’ve bought an MSI Wind for travelling. It was only £309 from play.com and came with Windows XP, a 160GB hard drive, 1 GB RAM, wifi, bluetooth and a 6-cell battery. A second gig of RAM cost about £11 from crucial.com.
It’s now running Mac OS X, 10.5.6. There’s lots of information at MSIWind.net including full instructions on how to install Apple’s operating system.
Once you have all the downloaded components to hand it’s about a 90 minute job. Everything works under OS X except sound in and the internal camera – new drivers are in progress.
All-in-all, a great little solution if you don’t want to carry a MacBook or MacBook Pro around with you.
