November 22, 2011

In November 2021 I built my first (and last) Hackintosh. It was a fun process, and having MacOS running on my own hardware was very fun, but I've had my fill. Problems with updates, fucking with plist files, keeping up to date with OpenCore changes, losing whole weekends to OS upgrades, having to fight to get features back after OS upgrades, the fact that I never got the mic/headphone combo jack on the front panel to work... It's worse than running fucking Linux!

Anyway, today I wiped the old bastard and I'm installing Windows 11 on it at this very moment. The plan is to put it in the living room and turn it into a media center/gaming PC. It's nice to have it off my desk -- the Mac Studio is about 1/5 the size of the Hackintosh, so I've got loads of free space now :-)

As part of the decommissioning process, I wanted to put the original WiFi card back into the machine, which required taking it completely apart, which was as shitty as I remembered. Somehow I managed to make it so the fan light doesn't come on anymore, which is more annoying than anything, especially since I took the video card out and unplugged a few cables at least 3 times trying to get the fucking thing working. I did make one fun discovery, that explains why the machine had problems converting a gigantic video file -- turns out, I'm not great at applying thermal paste. I should've been a bit more liberal with it, it would seem.