[geeks] Netbook/OS X suggestions?

[gsm at mendelson.com]

On Fri, Jan 01, 2010 at 01:05:49PM -0600, William Barnett-Lewis wrote:
>Happy 2010 all!
>
>Well, the coke spill from a few months back is catching up to my
>Macbook. The fan has died  & overheating occurs rather often as a
>result. We can't afford a new Mac or even what Apple repair wants

Many people have found that the fan problem is actually software. I've fixed
one such problem by emptying the print queue (even though there was no 
printer defined, just opening did it). 

If you are are UNIX person open a terminal window and run top, if not
run activity monitor and make sure to select all tasks (not just your user).


>($800!).
>
>OTOH, we _might_ be able to afford a netbook. What is the best
>compromise between cost, ability to take the SATA drive from this
>machine, & hacking OS X to work on it?  The MSI Wind looked good back
>when the spill first happened, but is it still? Is there something
>better? Cheaper? Faster :) ? I've got 3 gig in this, if the sticks can
>be recycled that would be a plus.

A year ago the Wind was a hot choice, I am doing exactly that now, but not
currently. When I got it you could bit torrent an ISO, plug in a DVD drive
and in an hour have a working OSX system. The only add on was a third party
driver for the Wifi card (became available mid December 2008), or change
the wifi card for one that could be bought for $35 on eBay.

Since then Snow Leopard came out. Some people have hacked it work on the MSI,
but the pop it and install disk image has yet to appear.

To make things worse Apple has modified the OSX kernel in 10.6.2 to not
run on an ATOM processor. Eventually a hack will come out, if it hasn't,
you have to install 10.6.2, boot from an older disk and re-install the
10.6.1 kernel. I expect that in 10.6.3 there will be something that prevents
that from working.

The Wind BTW takes ONE SODIMM, an it can be 512m or 1g, but not bigger.

Geoff.

-- 
Geoffrey S. Mendelson, Jerusalem, Israel gsm at mendelson.com  N3OWJ/4X1GM
New word I coined 12/13/09, "Sub-Wikipedia" adj, describing knowledge or
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i.e possessing less facts or information than can be found in the Wikipedia.