Monday, 4 Feb, 2008  |    3 Comments

Hello, new reader, I welcome you to read my previous (intro) post first, here: My MSI EX700 MAC OSX86 Hackintosh Part 1/3 - the laptop.

If you've been following already, here I'll show you what hardware from the MSI EX700 laptop worked OOB and what not:

  • The LCD is working correctly Out of the box. Nothing to add here. The first startup was at the original res, 1400x900.
  • The Celeron-M 530 CPU has been recognized by the "Apple"->"About this Apple"-menu as "Unrecognized" (!); everything works just fine, CPU-Z 1.43 said it does support SSE2, SSE3 and EM64T. The Apple Mac OSX is a power and ram savvy OS, so Apple does support (and highly suggest), the adoption of a CPU able to perform SSE2 and SSE3. My Celeron-M seems able to fit, almost perfectly.
  • Original installed laptop memory was 1Gb, too less for a New Gen OS like Mac OS X; I suddenly added (post-install) a Value Corsair 2Gb memory module 667Mhz DDR2 . The OS recognized the amount as expected, totaling 3Gb of RAM.
  • The nVIDIA Geforce 8400M G, 128MB VRAM on board (mxm Type II - difficult to replace), was a thouger game, since 10.5.1 has no support for this kind of GPU (that's why first bootup & intro are slow and crappy). Upcoming 10.5.2 is including support for nVIDIA Geforce 8X00 series, (yup, Apple Mac OS X world doesn't have direct drivers from the 3rd party Vendors, they are included inside OS and updates). Since there's 10.5.2beta around, this guy pre-packaged for us the beta drivers: http://scottdangel.com/blog/?p=15 (and say thanks,,,). Just download, double-click and install. Upon reboot I had Quartz Extreme/Core Image working! (once you're at scottangel's website, grab your copy of intel compiled Firefox and also thank him again!).
  • On my HDD, everything went smooth; I just reformatted it, creating a 100Gb partition with HFS+ for the OS; then a second, tmp partition for...I don't know what for! I've chosen MBR as boot method (not GUID), and selected the appropriate settings from Kalyway ("Custom"). Although I would have liked to partition everything myself, I choose to stay standard, for the sake of functionality. BTW, I've read various hints on how to install MAC OS X on a partitioned HD (look here for MAC OS X Users partition and here for MAC OS X separate swap partition); it seems a tricky and non standard task, and Apple strongly recommends not to partition (why?). My experience tells me that a good partitioned HDD offers performance improvements, if done correctly (maybe I'll share som tricks into another post 'bout that).
  • DVDRW Is working out of the box (I tested DVD read and write with known MAC burning software - toast).
  • Sound worked perfectly after applying a patch; I used ALC883Audio.pkg and followed How-Tos to install kext files (briefly, on a terminal, clean the cache by deleting /System/Library/Extensions.mkext & /System/Library/Extensions.kextcache with rm, make a backup copy of your original kext; cp yourkext.kext /System/Library/Extensions, fix permissions with "sudo chmod -R 755 yourkext.kext && sudo chown -R root:wheel yourkext.kext" then reboot - for more info ask or search the insanelymac forum). Beware: no integrated mic working. To use your mic, you'd have to plug an external one.
  • WLAN Atheros AR5007EG still not working, there is still work to be done here.
  • My Gigabit LAN Port Realtek based was working out of the box.
  • Bluetooth working out of the box. I clicked the Soft Button to power it up and it was suddenly recognized. I tested a file transfer with my cell and it all went smooth.
  • My Webcam was recognized as BisonCam from Vista; after some research, I think I figured it is a kind of Ali M560x series, but I am not sure. There is an open source project that is working on the implemetation of free webcam drivers called macam, there is hope that someday that cam could be recognized. For now, get a compatible webcam.
  • My Battery wasn't recognized, so I had to implement another kext kernel patch, the Powermanagement_bundle (just follow the info there!), wich activated a kind of ACPI support. After rebooting, my battery was recognized and the power indicator showed up near the clock, but I could not change CPU speed manually.
  • My italian keyboard was working out of the box, but some obvious keys were mismatched (since I come from PC-world only, I discovered that MAC Keyboards are kind of different). For further help, you can install a cute program named Double Command and do some remapping.

Congrats, now you have a 90% working cheap-mac. On next article I'll group some personal considerations.

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