Operating System Follies, Part 24

Again with the reformatting of my Dell Mini 9 computer. It took the better part of a Sunday but I finally pulled the trigger on something I've been wanting since I bought the damn thing in March - I am running Mac OSX on my tiny netbook. I'd show you a picture of it in action but a: it's boring, and b: I can't turn the webcam on my screen, because it's built in.

I'd have done this long ago but it's a little elaborate. Apple doesn't want its OS running on non Apple hardware, so the first thing you have to do is fool the installer disk into working with the Dell. Fortunately this is accomplished with a free hack, but to run the hack I had to pay for the following:

External disk drive, because the Netbook rightly doesn't include one
Internal 32 gig Solid State Drive, because the netbook shipped with 8 gigs. Which was plenty for Linux, but Linux looks like 1995.
2 gig RAM - come on, RAM is cheap.
OSX - would have cost me $100 and change, had I not already owned a copy.
A Sunday afternoon - then again it was 100 degrees out there, so it's good that I had an excuse to say in.

I've used Windows 7 and OSX on this device and I have to say for a variety of reasons, OSX is much better. It's snappier. It takes OSX about 5 seconds to awake from sleep vs 40 seconds for Windows 7. The rest of the system is similarly elfin and sprightly. And because I subscribe to the pricey .mac service, everything synchronizes automatically so now the netbook already knows all my bookmarks and passwords and email accounts. I'm a happier man than I was this time last week.

Windows 7 looked a little better and shipped with great games, but I can DOWNLOAD games man.