MSI Wind advantage over "Real" Mac's

In addition to the obvious "it is cheaper" difference, there is one other huge advantage these tiny machines have over the new unibody Macs. They can Jailbreak iPhones.

Apparently, the new unibody Macs can not jailbreak iPhones or iTouches. The MSI Wind, can use Pwnage Tools to jailbreak the iPhone or iPod Touch without any problem.

After Installation

Ok, so you've installed OSX and it is working fine. Now what? If you're already comfortable with OS X, you probably already loaded all the software you need, but if this is your first OS X computer, you're probably a little confused. If you need help, feel free to ask me for help in the comments, or check out my other blog on customizing OS X. Here you will find software that is practically essential to OS X, as well as review on other interesting software titles.

Updating to 10.5.6...Not Yet

Apple released the update for 10.5.6, but I recommend against doing it, as people who have tried it have encountered problems.  As soon as there is a way to do it that works every time, I'll post it on the blog.  Some of the problems include messing up the resolution, and unresponsive keyboard and/or mouse.

Possible Upgrades

There are 4 things that can be upgraded in the MSI Wind.

1. Hard Drive:  The computer will take any 2.5" hard drive.  Now they go as big as 500 GB for little more than 100 Dollars at Newegg

2. Ram:  You can install up to an additional 1GB chip of DDR-2 laptop RAM for a total of 2 GB.  (Leopard runs perfectly fine on 1 GB though)

3. WiFi Card:  You could install a wireless N card from Dell, but I don't see the point now that the stock Realtek chip is working.

4. Touchscreen:  There are touchscreen kits for the Wind floating around Ebay for around 100 Dollars.  While I haven't personally seen a Wind with this installed, it sounds like a really nice upgrade.  I'll write more about it as soon as I find out more.

Still Not Working

The only things to fix now are the internal mic, and the mic port.  I'll post them as soon as they are fixed.  Hibernate is also not working, but because Apple uses an EFI based hibernation, this is not necessary.  The computer will sleep and wake instantly (faster than Apple computers), but will waste more battery when in sleep mode.

Step 3: Get WiFi and Headphone Out working

Now we are going to finish making this computer into a perfect little netbook.  We'll enable wifi using Realteks new driver.  Though not officially released, some of Realteks emplyees have leaked a beta version which works perfectly.  Search for "realtek osx wind torrent" and download the driver from any torrent site.  Install this and you'll have working WiFi.

For the Headphone Out,  first download CHUD Tools 4.6.1 from Apple's Developer Site. You can register with a free account to gain access to download this file.

Install that software.

Next, Download this file

(once again, special thanks to the guys at MSI Wind forums for these files)

And extract it.  Move both files to your home folder (not desktop or documents, straight to you home folder), and fire up Terminal.

Once you have terminal open, type:

chmod 755 switch.sh

./switch.sh

Hit enter after every line, and you will be asked for you admin password.  Enter it and hit enter again.

Now, you can make a shortcut to the other file (Spk-Hp Switch) to your dock.  When you open it, it will ask for your admin password every time.  You must enter it and hit OK.

What this Spk-Hp Switch does, is it switches your audio from you speakers to you headphone jack, so if you want to use your headphone jack, simply plug headphones in, and run Spk-Hp Switch.  If you want to switch back to speakers, run it again.  

 One thing to note, is that after a reboot or waking up from sleep, the computer will automatically be in external speaker mode, so to use headphones you must simply run Spk-Hp Switch, and switch to the Headphone Jack.

Step 2: Update to 10.5.5 and fix Video and Sound

The next step is to update your machine to 10.5.5 and fix the video and sound outputs, as they will stop working with the update.

Simply fire up apples software update, and update everything, including the update to 10.5.5.  If you cant get 10.5.5 from there, just download the combo update to 10.5.5 from apples website, and install it separately.  At this time, there is still no WiFi working, so just plug it in with ethernet.  You can share the internet connection to it from a WiFi enabled computer too.

Now your video should be at 800x600 and you get no sound.

To fix that download and install this package:

special thanks to the guys at MSI Wind forums for this file.

This will fix your screen and sound.  Now you should get sound from the speakers and be able to use native screen resolution at 1024x600.