Apple

The wonderful tale of me hackintoshing my old PC

At first, I just had a MacBook Pro, which was fine. But I felt as I needed another computer to do my experiments on.

Samplasion

May 9, 2020 • 2 min read

Important Notice
The process I'm about to describe falls under a legal grey area, as it's against Apple's Terms of Service. I do not encourage anyone to download the stuff I downloaded. For a "legally safer" way to hackintosh, especially useful if you have a newer computer with EFI support, head over to r/hackintosh. (no, I'm not sponsored)

Update 17/07/2022
I've fixed the product name below, as I found out it's not X1041X but rather X1041C. Funnily enough, searching Google for imedia "x1041x" only brings up this page.

Ahh, the quarantine, what it makes me do...

At first, I just had a MacBook Pro, which was fine. But I felt as I needed another computer to do my experiments on. Yeah, I succeeded; I found an old PC in a box in my house, a Packard Bell Imedia X1041C.

The front of the computer showing all the ports. The upper side is a bit dusty. There's an Apple sticker next to the power button. — It's a bit dusty, but it works. The Apple sticker is my touch

So I restored it and installed Windows 10 on it. Then 8.1. And then 7. Yes, I slid with the operating systems on this machine. Eventually, I settled on 7. But I decided it wasn't enough.

So I downloaded a Yosemite image that was modified to work under old PCs and I applied it to a USB stick. From Mac I saved my data, I erased my disk and installed Yosemite. Sounds easy, doesn't it? Not at all.

The Wi-Fi Driver isn't included out of the box. So I had to look up dozens of Google pages before finding the one that worked. And I coupled it with a nice Preferences panel so I have everything nicely laid out.

The graphics driver also isn't there. Or, it is if you're not as dumb as I am and you don't select the "Disable NVIDIA driver for newer cards". Turns out the driver is there, but dumb me didn't notice and ended up installing Yosemite 3 times.

All the ports work correctly, even the SD card slot, which surprised me at first. I haven't tested the other kinds of ports, but all 6 of the USB ones are working as expected. As of now, everything works fine (apparently including iCloud) except for the shutting down functions that hang before actually turning down. All in all, I'm happy with my setup.

And as always, tell me what you think in the comments. Stay safe!