David Flynn31 October 2007, 3:27 AM
Your Mac can run Windows, courtesy of BootCamp. Now there's a clever hack which lets your Windows PC run Apple's fresh-baked Leopard OS.
Got a USB flash drive? Of course you have! Not afraid to experiment a little when it comes to furthering your experience with all things cool- in-a-slightly-geeky way? We reckon that's a safe bet.
Having ticked both those boxes, you're just one step away from installing the latest Mac OS onto any recent-vintage built-for-Windows machine.
The rest of the recipe is waiting at DailyApps, although the site sends those looking for the necessary files -- including a modified image of Leopard's install DVD and the necessary patch program to run on your PC post-install -- over to the Demonoid site. Obviously DailyApps is exercising caution rather than risk a call from Apple's legal hit-squad.
So as long as you're willing to experiment, there's no need to wait for Apple to release a slim sub-notebook or even a boxy looking desktop for a dash of retro chic.
DailyApps warns that the hack works on Intel-based PCs with at least SSE3 (Streaming SIMD Extensions 3.0), which Intel released in early 2004 - so this covers pretty much all PCs within the past three and a half years, from the Celeron D and Pentium D (as well as the Prescott, Prescott 2M and Cedar Mill-class Pentium 4s) through to the latest Core Duo platforms.
While AMD also introduced SSE3 support starting with the Venice and San Diego families of the Athlon 64, these were only a partial implementation of a subset of SSE, so there's no guarantee you can turn that spare AMD box into a pseudo-Apple.
We'd like to hear from any readers who attempt this feat and get Leopard up and running on their Dell, HP, Toshiba or what-have-you.
Question is: what PC notebook most closely matches the hardware mix in a "real" Mac, for the best driver support in Vista?