I took the leap of faith over the weekend and dove into the world of hackintosh, where pcs and macs hold hands and live in harmony. Actually it was a f**ing maddening process, but now that everything is somewhat running stable (crossing fingers) I can say that it was worth it.

After 3 days of tweaking and tuning, and 10 re-installs later, I’m able to dual boot Vista and OSX through the bios without any major bugs or glitches. I also picked up a wireless apple keyboard, so while running Leopard I feel completely at home in apple land. All my peripherals worked out of the box for most part and from this point on it’s a matter of playing around with some settings to make sure every detail is right. If you’re interested in making the jump I’d say hit up insanelymac.com for tons of resources on how to get the job done. I was lucky that my el boog was able to help me get started and share his experiences.

My specs are: (Using Kalyway 10.5.2)
Dell Inspiron 530 Quad Core - Q6600 (2.40Ghz 1066FSB)
4GB DDR2 SDRAM at 800MHz
256MB Radeon HD 2600 XT (swapped to NVidia GeForce 7600 GT, both works)
OSX on Western Digital 640GB Serial ATA II Hard Drive(7200RPM)
VISTA on Western Digital 500GB Serial ATA II Hard Drive(7200RPM)
Dell 19 in 1 Media Card Readerincluded in Dell Bluetooth Package (Works OOB)
On Board SB Audigy Audio (Works w/ RealTek ALC888)
PCI-E WiFi TRENDNET TEW-623PI (Works w/ Drivers)
Wacom Tablet (Works w/ Drivers)
Canon Pro 9000 (Works w/ Drivers)
Canon N676U Scanner (Works w/ Drivers)

Hit me up in the comments if you own a 530 and are interested in doing your own. In my experience, Dell 530 is an awesome machine to hackintosh since you get a lot of bang for the buck and relatively easy to setup. Not for the weak of heart tho as it’s a grueling process of trial-and-error that can potentially drive you nuts.

Pics of my setup: