Want 33% more battery on your Hackintosh? Install OS X 10.5.7
Has hell frozen over in Cupertino? However this came to be, there are (perhaps more than) a few MSI Wind owners that are cheering the big battery boost that comes by updating their Hacintosh netbooks to the latest version of Apple’s operating system.
Posters on the MSI Wind forums (via Wired) report that their OS X-powered PC netbooks that they are now getting up to 33 percent more battery up time after installing Mac OS X 10.5.7 Update. Charlie Sorrel writes in Wired:
It’s entirely possible that the OS update contains better power management for the Mac. What is surprising, though, is that it is having such an impact on these Hackintoshes, which are notoriously bad for battery usage when running OS X. Needless to say, I’m grabbing the huge (729MB) update for my Wind right now. With its monster nine-cell battery, I’m hoping to get around ten hours of use out of it.
Specifically, several MSI Wind Hackintosh owners/forum posters are saying they’ve experienced a jump from 3 hours 45 minutes to about 5 hours of useable battery time after installing OS X 10.5.7. Moreover, rather than simply believing what Mac OS X is reporting, they’ve actually timed their netbooks and the numbers are coming back good.
Hmm, when battery life is the neighborhood of five hours, that roughly speaking represents a full day’s use (i.e., that’s what I’m getting on my early 2008 MacBook). However, if I could have a netbook that delivers similar or better battery performance, that would be a compelling reason to purchase one of these ultra-portable computers.
If you are anything like me, you will be watching Wired carefully for news about how Charlie Sorrel’s experiment goes. If you see it before we do, pop us an email at the Blorge news desk…
What’s your take?
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