Max Glenister

I’ve had a Dell Inspiron 1525 for about 18 months now. It’s not my main computer, so I’m often messing with it.

Some time last year I made the jump to running OS X Leopard on the Dell, with some work and guides put in by the folks over at the InsanelyMac forums and a guide by Espresso Report/Daily Blogged. I had Leopard running on my Dell perfectly, and all of the hardware that I cared to work worked.

Earlier this month I decided that I wanted to subject my Dell to being a test bench for Windows 7, so I decided to run that on the Dell for a while before running it on my main computer.

Now that I have no need for Windows 7 on my Dell I’ve decided to return to OS X, but this time with the newly released Snow Leopard.

My Dell Inspiron 1525 is probably the most bottom of the range spec available, but it’s as follows:

• CPU: Celeron 540 1.86GHZ, 533Mhz fsb, 1MB cache
• Memory: 1GB, 667Mhz fsb
• Graphics: Intel GMA X3100 – Just like the graphics chipset on the Macbooks!
• Screen: 15.4” Glossy WXGA screen (1280x800)
• HDD: (upgraded) 120GB, 7200rpm, 8MB cache, SATA2
• Wireless: “Dell Wireless 1390” – This is a Broadcom wireless card, just like Apple’s Airport cards!

I installed using a retail Snow Leopard DVD, and a “Boot-132” boot CD created for the Dell Inspiron 1525 by the guys over at Mac your PC. At the time of writing this post I should note that many people have understandably had problems getting Snow Leopard installed on their computers.

I had a couple of initial troubles myself, but eventually worked through them by trying some alternate darwin boot flags, and now I’ve got a vanilla install of OS X Snow Leopard running better than Leopard ran previously on my Dell Inspiron 1525.

The process (outlined in more detail at Mac your PC) is relatively simple:

• burn the Boot-132 CD to a CD-R/CD-RW
• boot the Dell with the CD, it will load the “Chameleon” bootloader
• swap the Boot-132 CD for your retail Snow Leopard DVD (the upgrade DVD works fine here too!)
• type some darwin boot flags (the guide said to use “-x -v” which would be “single user mode” and “verbose”, but for me using “-x -v -f -legacy cpus=1 platform=X86PC” seemed to be the only way to boot the installer)
• install Snow Leopard as usual, but first partition/format the HDD
• after install, boot the computer with Boot-132 CD again, but this time select the HDD to boot with “-x -v” flags
• install remaining “Post-install” packages, which includes Chameleon for the HDD, and then a couple of .kext (driver) files to make OS X play nicely with the Dell hardware!

Now that that’s all done, I’ve got a perfectly functioning Snow Leopard install on my Dell Inspiron 1525 laptop.

During the installer my WiFi worked and picked up my home network, and unlike with Leopard I didn’t need to do any “sleep tricks” to get the display to turn on once OS X had booted.

The differences between Leopard and Snow Leopard, though small in comparison to other upgrades, were quite noticable. Some really nice small touches, from the way the stacks on the Dock.app function, to how the multiple desktops on spaces work. I’m really impressed.

Update: You can see the updated version of this guide here