Mac Mini or Hackintosh

[rockandroller]

On the subject of Mac Mini...

But first - Please excuse a long tangential preamble: I came to these forums because I mainly work on a Windows Machine, but plan to start some IOS development. Due a pending cross-globe relocation, I will need to buy a NOTEBOOK very soon, and MAC notebooks are (relatively) crazy expensive, especially considering I will do 80% of my work on Windows platform. So Hackentosh seemed like a reasonable solution. However, I'm seeing it's somewhat dicey getting a Hackentosh Notebook to play well - and I am stuck with buying a notebook pretty soon. By 'soon' I mean, I must have one up and running the same day I hit the shores of North America... and I'll be limited somewhat in my notebook choices since I'm landing in a pretty small city. SO.... my original plan was to buy some kind of nice Win7 notebook, and use it dual-boot into MacOS from time to time.

But - "also", in six or 8 weeks we'll be settled, and I'll need to buy a desktop for my wife. (she will need a general purpose home computing machine).

So... back to the subject of MAC MINI. My wife hates computers! Particularly, she hates fan noise and radiation. So I was planning to buy her one of those tiny little (near-silent) Asus EEE box machines, and hide it under her desk, with only a mouse, keyboard, and 24 inch monitor to bother her.

However, while looking at the expensive MacBooks, I noticed the Mac Mini is portrayed as an unobtrusive, silent little box. A little more costly than an Asus EEE box, but also slightly more powerful. So now i'm thinking - "Hmmmmmmm...." maybe I should get her a Mac mini, set it up to dual boot into windows 7 (with win7 as the default OS, since she only knows Windows) - and commandeer it from time to time for my upcoming IOS development work?

So seeing as users of these forums seem to be well versed in Mac-ism, (I've never owned one, if you don't count the ATARI FALCON with the Mac Classic ROMs) I'll get around to my questions:

Is the Mac Mini suitable as a Windows machine (can we hook up a regular "windows" USB mouse and USB keyboard, and just leave it like that?)

and...

Is the MAC MINI a reliable box - are Macs in general pretty well built and long lasting, glitch free hardware platforms?? (Relative to say a mid-level ASUS MB with good RAM and hard drives). I've had enormously long service from many ASUS boxes I've cobbled together over the years, and I would hate to dump a load of money into Apple hardware, just to have it fall apart right after the warranty runs out...

Any and all comments are greatly appreciated!

 

[toitle]

It seems a shame that she won't take the time to learn the MacOS. My dad is 77 and he picked it up in an hour and has never looked back. But, I get it, people like things a certain way.

The mac mini idea is good. It will serve it's purpose well, I have clients with new minis that run dual boot for very specific pieces of software. VMware doesn't seem to run them well and it gives them the best of both worlds.

In your laptop situation I would much rather buy a less than year old mac laptop than a brand new anything else. I'm not a mac fanboy, I have years of experience in seeing how laptops are treated. I converted an entire company to buying mac laptops exclusively (running win 7). The cost of ownership decreased significantly over a two year period due solely to durability. Around here, Portland Oregon, used macs are usually a good price. If you purchase a less than year old, or one still covered by applecare you can extend it.

But, back to the question of best laptop for dual boot:

The only ones that I've personally seen work well are expensive, in macbook-pro price territory.

 

[cheperun]

Hi,

First thanks for you responses. I have the motherboard,ram, cpu and box but i search the graphic card zotac and i not found this model. Do you know another model same at this? Because i need a small and good graphic card.

Thank you very much

 

[cheperun]

Hi another time,

One question. I found this motherboard http://www.gigabyte.com/products/produc ... id=3783#ov
and it has graphic card integrated. I search in the database of Tonymac and i found it . In this .aml have the graphic drivers.? And how can i install this file? Because i don't found any guide.

Thank you very much