This week in geek
My obsession with polls and other election-related news truly has officially moved from healthy political interest to unhealthy freaky compulsiveness. So with that in mind, I invite you, dear reader, to take a sojourn from Bradley effects, vicious genetic rumors and other campaign hijinks to read about my recent laptop exploits.
Our story begins last spring, when while ill I made a tactical error regarding the reliability of my motor skills and dropped my 12″ iBook with hard drive happily active. While the noises the drive made after the incident were positively fascinating, its ability to function as a reliable data storage device was not. I shelved the now-dead machine and purchased a refurbished MacBook for my lovely wife (now pregnant, I might add) so that she’d have a computer for school.
Fast forward several months to August, when I decided to attempt replacing the fatally wounded drive. Unlike the new Macbooks, the old 12″ iBook provided no easy access to the drive, and the process for replacing it is no small undertaking. Undeterred by 14-page instructions, the need to purchase strange-sounding tools and countless other warnings, I set out to give my laptop new life.
Alas, I found myself ultimately in the company of Dr. Frankenstein; the reanimation did not go well. Not only did I manage to rip off the delicate power supply socket from the motherboard (step 32 in the aforelinked guide), but it turned out that the drive I’d purchased had a different interface than that depicted in the guide, rendering it entirely useless for the task at hand. The machine was lost… I was left with little choice but to disassemble it as much as possible so as to alleviate my anguish. A photo of the disemboweled 12″ G4 iBook has been provided for your macabre pleasure.
This left me pondering my next move. I loved the 12″ size; but of course Apple has discontinued it. I considered buying another refurbished MacBook, but could not justify the expense and did not relish the ensuing confusion with my spouse regarding whose machine was whose. Not long after, I learned of the netbook crafted by heretofore unheard-of Taiwanese company MSI that appeared well-suited to being a “Hackintosh.” Intrigued, I spent time doing research and concluded that it was an attractive option, but at $500+ cost more than I could justify spending for a mere 10″ screen and scant battery life. Around this time word also got out that Apple would be “refreshing” its laptop offerings in mid-October, and one of the many wild rumors was that a low-cost notebook was going to be released. I waited with baited breath.
Of course, no such machine was announced, as the rumored $800 item turned out to be a new display. I pondered getting one of the new MacBooks despite the price tag, but couldn’t stomach spending that much for a machine with a glossy screen and no firewire. Fortunately, at roughly the same time Apple announced its new machines, MSI revealed that Best Buy would be carrying its elegant little Wind for a mere $399.
While the circumstances of Best Buy’s sale of the MSI Wind were highly unusual — no mention on the Web site, for example — I managed to track the model down at a store just south of Denver while visiting my mother-in-law.
Then began the process of tailoring the machine to my needs (read: installing OS X). I bought a 4 GB USB stick drive on Amazon for around $13 to use as the vessel for the Leopard installer. I also bought a $14 Dell 1390 wifi card off eBay, as it is natively supported by OS X while the original Realtek that comes in the Wind is not. And I had a 1 GB of ram lying around (where it originated, I can’t recall) that I dropped in to improve performance — a boon considering it only had 1 GB to begin with.
After several hours spread across several days formatting partitions, running installers, updating the BIOS, adding kernel extensions and configuring other scripts, I now have a lovely, highly-portable, dual-boot laptop running OS X 10.5.5 and Windows XP Home. Though the webcam is a little flaky and the mic hears nothing, pretty much everything else works beautifully — even one of the more significant hurdles (getting the headphone jack to work) has been cleared thanks to an elegant integration of shell scripting, AppleScript and Quicksilver. The fora at msiwind.net and insanelymac.com have proven invaluable.
The machine is, of course, far from perfect. For one, battery life leaves a lot to be desired; I’m lucky to get 90 minutes on a charge. Fortunately, a more powerful 6-cell battery will be available at Amazon in a few days for $140 and I intend to acquire one. Considering that this entire setup has cost me a total of $456.80 to date — significantly less than half the cost of a new macbook — it’s an expense I can well afford.
Screen real estate is also problematic: 10″ and 1024×600 is a tight fit considering the preponderance of toolbars most applications now sport. But tools like Spaces help alleviate much of the pain, and even though programs like Aperture do run on the Wind, it’s not my intention to employ them often. The keyboard also takes some getting used to, due both to its small size and the presence of ctrl-windows-alt keys rather than the more familiar ctrl-option-command labels. And I do miss two-finger scrolling. But such quibbles are minor considering the low cost and high portability it offers.
Thus far I’m quite pleased with the results of this endeavor. For the most part, getting OS X running was exceptionally easy, and the utility the msiBook provides over my Blackberry (or, for that matter, an iPhone) was well worth the time and expense. If you’re looking for a portable solution that comes with a keyboard but is smaller and lighter than Apple’s current laptop offerings, I highly recommend considering an MSI Wind.
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