Tiger on a Dell XPS 200?

Hi All,

I've been laying low and lurking (avidly) for a while; there's finally something regarding OS X I want to explore but have little knowledge of. Nevertheless, I'm mostly just looking to get the conversation started.

Dell's got a great deal on their XPS Desktops (0% APR for 18 months), and I'm seriously considering adding an XPS 200 to my computing arsenal (currently with Powerbook G4 and Mac mini), for games, media storage and as a theoretical dual boot desktop with OS X. Sounds ridiculous right now, right?

Given Apple's switch to Intel and the x86 platform, I was wondering how difficult it would be to dual boot OS X on the XPS 200's Core Duo Pentium D. Does anyone know if the Pentium D supports EFI? I'll go and reference This ZDNet Article, there's at least one other example you can google on installing OS X natively on a Windows Machine.

If I can get past the the processor difference, it seems that the XPS 200 is a good match for the new Intel iMac, of course there are small differences. I'm mostly wondering if OS X supports an XPS 200 spec'd out as such:

- Pentium D 820, 2.8 Ghz, Dual Core
- 128 MB ATI Radeon x600se graphics processor
- Sound Blaster Audigy 7.1 Sound Card

This is mostly theoretical at this point, and I'm not a technical person at all. The opportunity to explore this seems irresistable at this point, just to see.

Ultimately, when Leopard and Vista are released I'll be upgrading my Powerbook to a Macbook Pro with Mac as my primary platform (there's no way I'd ever live in a Windows world again).

Any input is well appreciated,
Jeff

your asking us to comment of pirating OS X on a Dell.....lets be honest here what sort of help do you think you will get on this theoretically or not?

There are websites and forums fully dedicated to what you are trying to do, as inflexion may have make you notice this is not the best place to talk about it... remember that every forum has its very own rules.

if even if u could get it on there it would be running crippled so it would not be worth it

buy a Mac for Mac OSX and a Dell for linux and for Windows, don't buy it

You can get a pirated copy of the developer release of OSX to run on the Dell machine, and it would probably run fine. That being said, there are some issues, as you may have noticed from the above comments:

1) It would be an illegal copy, something that is frowned upon in the Mac community. This ain't MS we're talking about here.
2) There would be no real upgrade path as all future OSX Intel upgrades will include the DRM/Trusted Computing Platform stuff that will keep it tied to Apples hardware.
3) Getting around 2 would likely require hardware modifications to the Dell, something that may not work too well.
4) Even if you get around 2, the odds of it working optimally are slim. Apple is only going to support what it included on it's hardware, not a bunch of 3rd party stuff that Dell and others will use.

In the long run, it's not worth the effort IMHO. There will always be hacks of OSX out there for non-Apple boxes, but they will never be as good as the real thing.