 You don't need to be an 'investor' to invest in Singletrack: 6 days left: 95% of target - Find out more
I'm toying with the idea of popping a second harddrive in my PC and attempting to set up a dual boot Windows/Macintosh setup; initial explorations seem to suggest that my motherboard and other hardware is reasonably compatible.
What I don't know is what OS I need. Unless I'm missing something, the Apple Store only appears to sell Mountain Lion as a download upgrade but I do appear to be able to buy a retail DVD of Snow Leopard from Amazon and other outlets; is this what I need or is Mountain Lion available on DVD for a clean install?
A retail copy of Snow Leopard is probably the way to go.
I have to say, having been there many times and wasted soooo much time on this- unless you have 100% compatible hardware ahead of time or are prepared to invest in some, I would save time, effort and hassle and just get a cheap second-hand Mac.
Its what I ended up doing, and I've never looked back.
YMMV.
Ditto the above. It can work really well, but only if you can get a good solid DSDT file for your hardware, supporting all the speedsteps and hardware sleep states etc.
If that makes no sense...do some more reading or accept it'll be a fiddle/not reliable.
I got lucky with my Scan bundle - a graphics card off Ebay and Snow leopard - or 10.6.8 as it's affectionatelly known - no doubt I'll be fretting over a mountain lion updgrade soon.
Snow leopard then upgrade seems to be the prescribed route
Question, why do you want a mackintosh?
Been there done that. I had a 12" Powerbook from 2003, wanted to stay with the OS but couldn't afford/justify the price of a new Macbook at the time so stuffed my gaming rig with a second HD and installed OS X (10.5 at the time I think). I spent the best part of 2 weeks trying to make it work perfectly and when it did, doing updates was just a proper pain. Twice updates broke it and had to start from scratch pretty much.
Buy a Mac, save for a s/h or refurbished mini or something like that. If you really want OS X that's the way to go. You may or may not make the Hackintosh thing work but even if you do do not rely on it.