My computer has been acting a little funny lately. Now it’s acting even funnier. Everyone who is a poweruser of Windows knows that there is a time when you should just wipe the drive and start over. This happens less and less as time goes on, but even with 7 x64, it happens. It was time.

Yesterday however, I took a detour and instead installed Snow Leopard on my machine. Using iBoot and Multibeast from tonymacx86.blogspot.com almost everything worked right out of the box.  I had to swap my ATI video card for an Nvidia based one for $65 on newegg, but other than that it’s the same i7 hardware I put together a couple years ago.

Quick run-down.  Asus P6T WS Pro motherboard, i7-920 @ 3.4GHz, 12GB of 1600 ram, Intel 80GB SSD.

The only thing that gave me a bit of a hiccup is that it wouldn’t sleep/wake quite right, but after a little searching I found this ‘sleepenabler‘ ktext to install which did the trick.  I put it to sleep last night and it brought me right back in the morning. Beautiful.

Gives me a geekbench score of  1oo34, which puts me faster than the current 4 core 3.2GHz Mac Pro, and that machine costs $3424 with the same kit in it.  I’m even approaching the speed of the 8 core monsters from a couple years ago. Not bad when you consider that I spent $1000 on this machine when I built it.

Though it was a bit of an experiment, I think I’m going to keep it for a while and see how it wears.  Moving my pictures over to Mac formatted drives is going to be a pain, but nothing a little music chair/drive and a lot of time can’t fix. It’s funny, the thing that annoys me the most is that Mac OS reacts differently to my Kensington Expert Mouse trackball so I’m having a hard time getting the speeds right.