Let me also begin with a disclaimer.  I’m a dad, small business owner, entrepreneur and Mormon.  I’ve never built a computer, taken a computer science class or hung out in geek clubs.  Some of what’s covered I have no idea what I’m talking about so if my terminology is off, feel free to flame away in comments.  But remember I’m not very technical.

The shopping list.

We’ve covered this before, but I’d like to expound on it a bit with some justification on why I picked what I did and how it all worked together.  My goal was to spend as little as possible, but as usual, I ended up spending a little more than expected.

Tonymacx86 has a whole page dedicated to the right parts and pieces to buy to build your system, no matter how average or powerful you intend it to be.  Everything on this list is so-called “approved” to be covered under the kexts and patches they provide to get the hardware running Mac OS.  Basically, if you stick to this list, you can use their standard utility installation thingies to make everything work.  He calls these “kits” CustoMacs and provides product links to Newegg, Amazon, etc.

What I bought and costs.

• Motherboard — – $115 — – http://goo.gl/XG3LD
• i3 CPU — – $135 — – http://goo.gl/hwSM7
• Graphics card — – $55 — – http://goo.gl/49C0E
• Case — – $50 — – http://goo.gl/kUJKq
• Ram (8gb) — – $46 — – http://goo.gl/7YLMt
• Power supply — – $70 — – http://goo.gl/v1Xz2
• Hard drive — – $100 — – http://goo.gl/2pAdd – — – used one I had laying around
• Optical drive — – $21 — – http://goo.gl/PUOi6
• Keyboard — – $50 — – http://goo.gl/fMo1C
• Mouse — – $30 — – http://goo.gl/gcF68
• PCI wireless network card — – $20 — – http://goo.gl/YypsM
• OSX Lion Thumb Drive — – $60
• 16 gb thumb drive — – $20

Total I spent was $672, but if you have to buy a hard drive, you’ll spend $762.  But I also bought a new screen for me and used my old one for the Hackintosh – so I spend another $250 on top of that.

Putting it all together.

There were a number of things I got caught up on when I was putting the actual components together.  Like I said, I’ve never done this before, so I had to do a little homework to be sure I was getting everything plugged in right.  Fortunately, I got everything right the first time, except for one power cable, which was easily noticed when the machine wouldn’t power up.

Pretty much everything was self explanatory with the exception of the little cables that come from the case that go to the bottom corner of the motherboard.  With those, you just have to look at the motherboard manual and compare what is supposed to be plugged in where.  The cables are all labeled.

Below is a breakdown of the location of all the parts and pieces I had to put together on the motherboard.  The 12v power plug was the power component I got hung up on.  The actual cable was an 8 pin cable, but it was actually two 4 pin connectors joined together.  This was deceiving to me at first.  However, once I realized what the dealio was, I snapped them apart and plugged one in and voilà.  Also, I bought an optical drive, but as of this post, it hasn’t come in yet.  I didn’t need it to install the os because I’m awesome; er Tonymacx86 is awesome.

1. The CPU, or processor we chose was an i3 Sandy Bridge 3.1GHz little monster.  We’ll be putting an i7 in it this summer, but this was all we could afford this go around.  This was an interesting install because I knew it was the brain.  It was actually quite fascinating to see the underside of this thing.  I should have taken a picture, but I didn’t.  Sorry.  The actual CPU was small, maybe the size of a large stamp and as thick as 5 credit cards stacked.  It was pretty heavy too.  Like bowling ball heavy.  It was weird.  Kidding. But to be installed on top of it was a radiator looking device with a fan on it – I assume to keep it cool once it begins thinking.
2. This is the power cable that through me off.  It’s also below.
3. This is where the ram went.  We bought 8gb of ram for this one, but we’ll upgrade to 16gb in a few weeks, actually.
4. This is the front panel audio connector.  There were connectors on the cable, I just plugged one of them in and it all worked.
5. This was a 1tb hard drive I had that I cleaned off.  Saved me $100.
6. The power supply we chose was the Corsair CX600.  I wanted to make sure I got something that would be enough to power everything.
7. Yea.  It came with a mess of cables.
8. I knew I wouldn’t need an optical drive to get it going, so I just did before it came in.
9. Motherboard was of Gigabyte brand. This is pretty important as just any ‘ol motherboard won’t work with a hackintosh well.  I picked this one specifically because it was recommended.  I also spent a little more proportional money on this since it’s essentially the central nervous system of this whole machine.
10. The front panel cables for the case were the most confusing part.

This is that pesky power cable that through me off.

This is the 24 pin main power cable.  This is pretty much what powers the whole computer.  Looks powerful, huh.

Below is the shot from the lower right of the motherboard in the top pic.  This was really the most confusing part.  These cables were the four cables that came from the front of the actual computer case.

• The orange/white cable is connected to the PW slot, which is wired to the power button on the front of the machine.
• The blue/white cable is connected to the reset slot.  This is wired to the reset button that’s found just below the power button on the front of the case.
• The red/white cable is the hard drive activity led light.  So, as your hard drive is doing stuff, this light flickers.
• The green/white cable is the power led, which is lit when the computer is on.
• The multi-colored 8/10 prong cable to the left of the front-case cables is the front case USB connector – which is how the USB ports on the front of the case work.
• The silvery, sort of transparent looking three-prong cable to the left of this assembly is the system fan, which is on the front of the case.

In this shot you can see a close up of the radiator-looking device and cooling fan for the processor.  Notice the fan cable that’s plugged in right above the motherboard.

This is what made it all possible.  And oh so easy.  Tonymacx86 provides a little program that basically takes the OSX Lion software off this little Apple USB dongle and puts it on the jump drive in a way that it will install Lion on the hackintosh.  But we’ll get into that in a couple.

Getting everything installed.

Putting together the hardware was the part that I thought was going to be the easiest.  But it wasn’t.  Getting the machine up and running was even easier.  And fast too.  I did it in a morning, like a short morning.

I need to begin this section stating that I didn’t know how to do any of this.  But following all the directions from Tonymacx86 to get the system ready here (link 1), then following the directions to get everything installed here (link 2) made it all very simple.  On the first link, I stopped reading at the part where I needed to get the CD ready, since I didn’t have an optical drive.  that’s where I moved over the thumb drive directions (next link).

Changing the BIOS.

The first thing you have to do is set your BIOS to ACHI mode.  Now I had no idea what the heck this meant.  And after tons of google searches I FINALLY figured it out, but it wasn’t really straight forward.  It was, however, super easy.

Note: all the instructions I got from here. 

In order to get into your BIOS, on the Gigabyte boards, you have to hold down the Delete button at startup.  This will take you into a DOS-looking program screen.  It’s all blue and only lets you move around with the keyboard.  No mouse.  Here is what I did:

• Started up and held down the Delete button
• When I get to the CMOS Setup Utility Screen, I down arrow to Integrated Peripherals and hit enter
• Arrow down to PCH SATA Control Mode (second option down), hit enter, then arrow to the AHCI and hit enter
• Then make sure all your other screens match the screens on this page correctly.  Hint: look at the top of the screen in the pictures, just below the CMOS Setup Utility text and it’ll tell you which page he’s on.

Once I got my BIOS stuff all set, I just needed to get Mac OSX Lion installed.

Getting Lion ready. 

As mentioned earlier, I purchased the OSX Lion USB dongle from apple.  I spent $70 on it, but there is a cheaper way.  Tonymacx86 has created a very nifty little program that will put Lion on a thumb drive, ready to be installed on your hackintosh.

Basically, follow all the directions he has, to the T, right here.

These directions made everything stupid easy.

I will say that I had one hang up once I got everything done.  It caused a kernel panic and ended with me having to reinstall the OS (which literally took like 10 minutes).  I got hasty and just checked all the boxes on the Multibeast install screen.  When you’re going through this, just make sure you check ONLY the boxes that are checked in this image below (also on the directions in the second link above).

This was the beginning, what’s in store for the future.

This was intended to be a base model.  I bought everything with the intention of upgrading in the very near future. Here is what I’ll be doing next.

• Upgrading from 8gb of ram to 16gb
• Upgrading from the core i3 dual core to the core i7 quad core
• Upgrading the graphics card
• Putting the OS and all apps on a 120gb SSD drive (currently running that with my Macbook Pro and it screams)

If you wanted to build a beast, this is what I would recommend.

You can pick from a very comprehensive shopping list here.

• Motherboard — – $155 — – http://goo.gl/TSnre
• i7 CPU — – $320 — – http://goo.gl/RWBcO
• Graphics card — – $200 — – http://goo.gl/aPvQH
• Case — – $50 — – http://goo.gl/kUJKq
• Ram (16gb) — – $92 — – http://goo.gl/7YLMt
• Power supply — – $120 — – http://goo.gl/wyk5I
• 1tb hard drive — – $130 — – http://goo.gl/oli53 – — – for storage
• Crucial SSD hard drive — – $210 — – http://goo.gl/Ai9h6
• Optical drive — – $21 — – http://goo.gl/PUOi6
• Keyboard — – $50 — – http://goo.gl/fMo1C
• Mouse — – $30 — – http://goo.gl/gcF68
• PCI wireless network card — – $20 — – http://goo.gl/YypsM
• OSX Lion Thumb Drive — – $60
• 16 gb thumb drive — – $20

Total cost to build: $1478

A touch of my perspective

To begin, let me say how thankful I am for my perspective.  And for the sake of clarity, I guess I should explain mine in two sentences.

Nobody owes you anything, and if you want something you have to take responsibility and take action.  If you spend your life blaming everyone else for what’s going on in your life, you’ll never grow, advance or have success.

A flawed perspective

I was in one of my condos, inspecting it to make sure it was perfect for our next guest.  I do this often to keep my housekeeping staff on their toes, and just to get my eyes in all of our condos every couple of weeks.

While I was out, I ran into a member of the cleaning staff for the onsite company.  We got to chatting, and I was told that it was companies like mine that were putting people like her out of a job.  After prodding a little deeper I discovered that the company she was working for was losing owner-clients hand over fist and her cleaning peers were being slowly let go as the inventory diminished.

Sigh.

The interesting part was that in no way could the ineptness of the company she worked for be to blame for their falter; at least in her eyes.  The sad part is that this perspective seems to be common among “employees”.

And when I say “employees” in quotes like that, I’m referring to a type of person that requires someone else to provide a job for them in order to make money.  They have no skills/ability/confidence to ask someone for money for services rendered, they need a job, from a boss, doing one thing in particular.

I guess this isn’t her fault, really.  I’m sure she has a great excuse for thinking this way.  Not much of a great reason, though.

In order for a company to grow, or at least not shrink

So, what do you do if you’re a business that starts losing, well business?  You figure out what’s causing all the bleeding, you stop it, and you make sure that the wound doesn’t happen again by being more proactive.

Let’s forget the figurative example and go with something more literal.

Let’s say you’re a rental business.  A big one.  You have tons of owner-clients.  Suddenly, after a couple years, they start leaving you for someone else.  Maybe you should ask them why they’re leaving.  Chances are, if there are some leaving, there are many more that are considering leaving, or are at least unhappy for the same reasons.

What if making your owner-clients happy is a total business model change for you?  Well, would you rather go through the hassle of changing your business model and STAY in business rather than not change, and go out of business?

The reality is, sometimes your customers/clients may not know what they want or need (in the spirit of Steve Jobs), but if they’re telling you you’re doing a bad job, you need to listen, or you’ll lose their money.

I’ve toyed inside Apple’s famous machines in the past doing:

• I replaced a dying hard drive in my 17″ MacBook Pro
• I installed and configured an Optibay in my new 15: MacBook Pro (and did the same for my buddy, Cebo.

Reading about Job’s and Woz’s adventures in sketching out circuit designs and assembling little blue boxes – I wanted to give my hand at it.  And seeing that I love Macs and loath Windows, I figured it would be fitting to build a Hackintosh.

What the heck is a Hackintosh?

What is a Hackintosh, you may be asking?  Well, as you may or may not know, building a Windows or linux based computer is seemingly an easy (and can be a very cheap) task.  If you have a little bit of savvy, you can hand pick your components based on a mixture of performance and budget and essentially build what you want.

With the Apple OSX operating system, just picking out your parts at NewEgg and throwing it all together won’t work.  You see, Apple is not only a software company, they’re a hardware company.  This is actually the fundamental difference between the Windows world and that of Apple – and what drives the religiously adamant conflicts.  It’s anti-open-source.  But it’s also why they are the most valuable company in the world today.

Putting philosophy aside, I love Apple products.  I’ve often been accused of being a fan-boy.  I have several authentic macs, several iPhones in the house, an iPad and I probably always will.  But I wanted to build a computer, and I loathe PC – so a Hackintosh seemed like the answer.

What we’re going to build.

So, spending days researching parts and pieces, I decided that the first version was going to have nothing integrated so we can upgrade easily in the future, but that we were going to buy amongst the cheapest parts, just to get started.  Incidentally, we’re still building a pretty beefy machine for a fraction of what it would cost in the Apple store.

I wanted to put together a machine that was easily upgradable.  Next summer I’ll want to put in an i7 processor – so all I need to do is buy the processor and swap it out.  I’ll want to double the ram — again, all I’ll need to do is buy the ram and slip it in the motherboard.  When I want to increase our graphics capability, all I need to do is buy the card and install it in place of the old one.  Get the picture?

Here is our shopping list.

• motherboard — – $115  – — – bought 12/17/11
• i3 cpu — – $135 – — – 65w
• graphics card — – $55  – — – 350w
• case — – $50 — – — bought 12/17/11
• ram (8gb) — – $46 — – — bought 12/17/11
• power supply — – $70 — – — 600w
• 500gb hard drive — – $50
• optical drive — – $21
• keyboard — – $50
• mouse — – $40
• screen — – use my Asus and buy a new one for me.
• pci wireless network card — – $20
• Total — – this is a semi-pro rig — – — $682

We chose our parts based on a list of compatible parts we found on the tonymacx86 blog.

We got the case in today – the ram and motherboard should be in later this week or next.

Since we’re on a tight budget, and don’t have a lot to spend, we’ll be buying the parts over the next couple months, documenting the progress here.

Keep an eye on this category for updates on this project.

This isn’t coming with lofty promises to post every day, or even every week.  No promises of inspiration.  No real desire to obtain a following.  No real desire to inflict motivation or share talent.  Or really practice proper gramatical use.

I just want to dump thoughts, talk about what I’m doing, maybe help (if you find what I’m writing helpful) and just get some words out there.

Those of you that know me probably know of my blogging successes in the past.  I’ve influenced, made money and moved on.

I have tons of things going on in my life I’d like to share – some of which will come up pretty soon. Like the Hackintosh I’m building with my son, the growth of my new business, or maybe my philosophy about trying being better than not trying – no matter the projected outcome.

I’ve blogged off an on, personally, for years, but the burden of performance has always held me back.  So, this time around, I’m going to blog with the following guidelines in mind.

1. I’m only going to blog when I feel like it.  If it’s been a month since you’ve heard from me, then tough.  I obviously haven’t felt like blogging.
2. I’m not going to proof, re-read, or edit my posts.
3. I’m going to write about whatever the heck I want to.  Whatever I have going on, I’ll write about (also refer to #1)
4. I may or may not follow the convention of adding a photo with each post.

When will my next post be?  Whenever I feel like it.

Today was paradise.  With the winter we’ve had many of us “locals” almost forgot we lived in the sunshine state, much less an area that rarely freezes.  So far this winter, I couldn’t count the hard freezes we’ve had on all my fingers and toes. Today, however, was paradise.

Warm, sunny, blue skies, gentle breeze.  |  Today was what winters in Florida are all about.

The day started with work, but definately ended in pleasure.  Going to one of our favorite parks,  Noah and Lily enjoyed a cool dip in the fountain while Ben explored every asset of the park.  Oscar was with his dad and greatly missed by all of us. I wish he didn’t have to miss so many of our Saturday jaunts.

Leaving the park, we drove back to the beach.  We entered the dunes across from Lahan’s Carousel.  It isn’t what it sounds like – just an old grocer with a fun name.  We love the beach there because it is so huge.  From the bottom of the dunes to the cusp of the water seems like a football field (it may just be).  Noah, Lily and Ben were ecstatic.

Again, the weather was perfect.