[driven]

Originally Posted by besson3c 

Usability has nothing to do with the adoption rate of technology though, although I might be misunderstanding your point here...

Most corporate deployments that fail have little to do with the functionality of the system, but more to do with the employees ability to effectively use it. So, yes, user experience (of which usability is a part) has quite a bit to do with the adoption rate of technology.

At a consumer level, ask yourself why the iPhone was a success when Windows Mobile failed? I used both. Both functioned as designed. I couldn't give a Windows Mobile phone to a typical business user though.

[seanc]

I've been Hackintosh-ing quite a few PCs since 10.5.

Right now I've got a Gigabyte GA-P31-S3L with an Intel E2140 and 2GB RAM in the garage for surfing/music and an Acer Aspire Revo (Atom 330) nettop at work running 10.6.7.

You don't need anything glamorous to run OS X, the "old" E2140 processor kicks the snot out of the iMac G5 it replaced.

[Big Mac]

I'd love to get into it because for certain tasks I'm so much more productive on a Mac, but the hardware I got for my first PC build, while close to the Hackintosh ideal, deviated a bit from the reference hardware and therefore it took months before people got my hardware working well as a Hackintosh (and by then I had lost interest in doing it for the time being). I hope Life Hacker keeps improving its Hackintosh hardware guide, although they're usually sufficiently behind the curve of the latest and greatest hardware (for obvious OS support reasons - Apple itself is usually behind the curve in cutting edge hardware support) that I can't picture myself ever buying the outdated hardware they recommend just to get a reliable Hackintosh. Maybe when my current i7 goes to my mother in three or four years I'll take out the second 5850 card and try to Hackintosh it.

[CRASH HARDDRIVE]

Heh. Lion is even easier to install than Snow Leopard was.

[seanc]

How about doing an upgrade from within SL, is it possible? I've only tried it on one of my machines and it's probably not the best candidate either - an Acer Aspire Revo R3610 with an Atom 330, 4GB RAM and 250GB 7200rpm HDD.
Just ends up rebooting back into SL - I guess it's meant to boot from something else into the installer...

[CRASH HARDDRIVE]

Here's the guide I used:

tonymacx86 Blog: xMove + MultiBeast: Install OS X 10.7 Lion on any Supported Intel Core 2 or Core i based PC

You'll notice in step1/item 4 that installing Lion over the current Snow Leopard won't actually affect the Snow Leopard install in any way, it will just copy the needed install files. This threw me off at first too- because it seems to install Lion, but on reboot you're right back at 10.6.x

The extra step is that you need to use the tool xMove to move the install files that Lion installed to an added drive partition (or possibly USB stick) and then boot the installer and install from there.

This should probably work on your Acer if you have enough space to make an 8GB partition for the Lion installer.

Otherwise (not entirely sure as haven't tried it myself) rather than create a hard drive partition you could try using an 8GB USB flash drive and target it with xMove.

Make sure you're running the latest Chimera (Chameleon 2 RC5- tonymac has all the needed files for download) and reboot- choose the Installer location, boot the Lion installer and then choose to install Lion over your existing Snow Leopard, or to its own partition.

I installed Lion directly over an already working Snow Leopard partition and it worked perfectly. It used all the same extensions in my Extra folder. The only thing I had to manually get working was my ethernet- apparently Lion drops support for Realtek networking chipsets. But it was easy to get this working again copying over the same Realtek kexts from Snow Leopard (and repairing ownership/permissions.)

I also clean installed Lion on a bare partition and that worked fine too- I just had to copy over my working Extra folder from Snow Leo and repair ownership/permissions.