Safari 3.1 for windows security risk

As windows iTunes user will know by now, the new 3.1 version of the webbrowser from apple called "safari" is out for windows. After it has been almost forced upon your pc when updating iTunes, it now has a big BIG security hole in it too.

The hole is a web address hack which allows a hacker to “falsify the web address and enter another page or content". This essentially means that even though you see a trusted URL in the browser address bar, the web page could be displaying unauthorised content that could put your PC at risk.

There goes your bank account then. As even IE7 is a lot safer than safari i would strongly recommend not using safari on your windows setup. Opera is probably the safest as it is the least used, and quite good browser.

Apple has to keep in mind that OSX is your friendly neigborhood, you know the kind where you can walk at night as a single woman, while windows is warzone kind where everyone is out to get you. Of course apple has no comments and no patches yet..

Media center hardware selection

Media center are for geeks is the common attitude, and maybe that is true as selecting the hardware, building it and most importantly installing and maintaining the software is quite chore. However there are hardly alternatives if you want to view video content in all different formats that you can find on the internet.

If you plan to pay for all your bluray's and dvd's then it is probably better to forget about a media center pc. In that case just run to the store and pick up a sony ps3, but only if you have a tv/beamer with a hdmi input. My "old" plasma screen does not have hdmi input, i have to make due with component video (ypbpr). The ps3 supports that but it will not upscale dvd content to 720p not will it display bluray with 720. No no as hollywood is scared that you could copy the good stuff, you only get 480p output from your hd stuff.

So if you have "old" equipment without hdmi input and you want to view HD content that you did not pay for, there is really one option left : The pc media center.

What do you need :

A nice looking box to put the pc in ; you do not want to have a midi tower next to your nice looking flatscreen tv now do you ? These hifi like boxes can be quite expensive. There are a few reasonable priced ones, i can recommend the following :

Lian li pc-c35 : Nice slim line case, only supports low profile cards
Thermaltake bach : Nice big size full atx media case, support standard hardware

Keep in mind that with the lian you have to get a uAtx board preferably with onboard video because of the very low profile of this case. The lian does come with a powersupply and looks like a high end dvd player.

Selecting the motherboard :



We are looking for an all in one solution, video, sound, hdmi on just one board. Currently the one to recommend is the gigabyte ga-ma69gm-s2h amd board. This is one of the very few boards that comes with a component video out ! Also very important is the onboard sound chip which supports DTS connect. DTS connect allows us to play back the 5.1 wmapro sound that is in many of the hd movies that you can find on the internet.

Wmapro is the sound standard of hidef wmv files. Only a few select receivers can understand that audio stream. The soundchip on the S2H board will convert the wmapro 5.1 stream into a DTS 5.1 stream and output it through spdif to your receiver. This is one of the very few boards where you do not have to run ac3filter to get decent spdif output !

The board also has a x1250 chipset from amd, which allows us to have smooth 720p and 1080p output (with some special software, read it in the next installment of the media center series on this blog).

Remote control :


This one is very simple : The microsoft remote control for media centers is not too expensive and works without any setup hassle !

Cpu And memory :

This is the simple part, as we plan to run vista mce we need 2gb 800mhz ddr2 memory. This is very cheap at the moment. For out cpu any amd x2 from the 3800+ to the 6000+ will do. No need to go overboard, the x2-3800+ is already enough.

Now we have the box, the board, and the components. Only thing left to choose is a harddisk and a dvd reader. Any will do of course, but i recommend a quiet seagate perpendicular drive.

Next in media centers : software selection and setup.

Safari forced onto windows itunes users

When you have iTunes installed on your windows pc, and have the apple software update running, something fishy is going to happen to you if you do not watch out.

Apple's software update will install it's webbrowser Safari without asking you ! The list of software updates lists it, and it is selected by default, of course you can unselect it however most users rely on the software updates to function normally and click "Yes" without reading.

This drive by tactic is really bad, as users rely on software updates to do just that : Update software that they already have. Users do not expect their pc's to be hijacked so that apple can install it's latest crappy browser. Safari on the mac is ok, but lets face it, on the pc it is not.

Imagine that microsoft would pull the same trick on Apple users when updating ms-office on the apple ! You would be able to hear the screams of apple users all the way into dark Africa.

Shame on you Apple !

The cult of mac

Whether you are running a hackingtosh or sitting behind a real mac, you can be part of the cult of mac. If you want to be part of that cult is another matter entirely. However now you can also read about it, free and legal.

The book "The cult of mac" has been released in electronic form for free ! So the least you can do is download it and see if you can read a 280 page book on your screen, or if you go out and buy the death tree version because of serious eye strain.

That is the new way of luring people into buying books, give away the electronic version, and hoping that the reader will buy the paper one before they turn blind because of monitor stare !

Any you can download it with any torrent client and here it is - Click -

Disaster hits, movie collection gone

Yesterday was a bit of a disaster, my media pc which is running on a beamer in my home cinema had a few problems. Vista decided that is was not genuine, which could well be true.. In my haste to patch vista i made quite a large mistake and erased the spanned partition that held 55+ HD movies.

I moved the harddisks to another pc and tried to make windows re-recognize the spanned volumes to no avail. Rebuilding the master boot record and trying to boot repair the vista install on the spanned volume also failed.

In the end i had no alternative as to reformat the drives and start fresh. As the Americans say : it's not a failure it's a learning moment ! What did i learn from this disaster ?

- Make backups
- Never ever use spanned volumes again
- Make backups
- Maybe pay for vista, or at least find a better crack
- Make backups
- Maybe start paying for movies
- Make backups

I will try to redownload all the lost content, but i am sure some movies are beyond the 70 days retention that i have with my usenet provider.

So there you go, spend more $$ on backup systems or maybe spend the same amount of $$ on bluray movies that you can actually buy...

In the comming days i'll write some on media center setups and hardware and software choices for that.

Dot mac account alternatives

Now that you have a hackingtosh running with leopard, another thing to add is the functionality of the dot mac account. As you might already know, .mac is quite expensive. In the EU it's 99 euro's a year while in the USA it's only 99 dollars a year. 99 Dollars is only 62 Euro's, so as usual apple want more profits from us poor Europeans.

However there are quite a few alternatives for all the extra's that .mac gives you. Some of them quite a bit better than the paid equivaltent from apple.

Here we go :

• Storing photo's with .mac = Use flickr it's free.
  
• iDisk = Adrive.com will give you 50 gigabytes of free storage, that's a lot better than apple's 10!
  
• Mac mail = googlemail, will save all your mail all the time for free
  
• Back to my mac = back to my mac through ichat and free
  
• Sync = Sync data without mac and free of course
  
• iCal online = Google calendar free and a bit better too
  
• .mac homepage = this is ussually a part of your providers internet package
  

Of course the above will not give you the .mac intergration and some of the features require a bit more work. On the other hand you also get substancially more online storage with adrive and all for free remember.

Overclocked s3 sleep error solution

As i wrote in the ga-ep35-ds3r review, it has problems waking from s3 sleep when overclocked. As i was trying all kinds of options, i hit the solution :

• On the main bios screen press ctrl-f1 to enable advanced options
• Select the advanced bios features screen
• Set the "No execute memory protect" to Disable (xd bit)

That's it no more bluescreens when waking from sleep when the fsb is over 300 ! As it is a motherboard/bios related the s3 solution works for both vista/xp. Strangely enough osx does not want to start with the XD bit set to disable, the apple boot screen comes up and then the board restarts. Running leopard on an overclocked ep35 is not a problem, but sleep mode will not function.

Gigabyte GA-EP35-DS3R Review

Two days ago a new gigabyte motherboard a ga-ep35-ds3r, short : ep35, arrived. This as a replacement to my ageing, but still very fast, asrock conroexfire-esata2. Together with the ep35 i also got 2x2gb team elite ddr2-800 ram for the new motherboard. Why a new board when the old one is still wokring good ? Well i plan to buy a E8400 when they are available. That new 45nm cpu does not work on the old asrock, and i also had problems getting 4gb to work on the asrock. Furthermore the ep35 allows quite a bit of overclocking, so i can finnaly run my E6600 a bit faster. The asrock board is not suitable for overclocking.

Box contents :

Beside getting the board, you will also find a quite large selection of extra's in the box of the ep35. You get 4 sata cables, 1 floppy cable, 1 ide
cable, manual, quickinstall guide, driver disk, a Sata backplate with cables. Quite a lot for a mid price board.

layout :

The layout has some problems as seem to be the standard nowadays. The IDE connector is at the extreme bottom of the board instead of next to the large power connector. This gives some problems with routing the big ide cable through the case. It is really better to swap it with the place of the floppy connector in the middle of the board.

Also the 12volt power connector is at the top left of the board, not a problem if you have a normal atx case where the powersupply is above the board, however if you have a coolermaster CM690 with the powersuppy on the bottom of the case you can run into some wiring problems. The thrid and final layout problem is the place of the connector of the audio front panel, this is at the left of the board instead of on the bottom, now i have a cable running over the hot 8800 gt.

Installation Vista / Leopard osx86 :

Installing was very easy, gigabyte includes a large quick install manual that is very understandable. So if you never assembled a pc before it is not that difficult to do. Vista + sp1 installed without any problems, and the drivers from the driver disk, or better the gigabyte website also.

As i already had a leopard install on my old board, i tried to start leopard with my new board and the old install on the harddisk. To my great suprise this worked ! Leopard start without any hickups, the only thing i had to do was install a .kext for the new onboard sound. This is really amazing as leopard is certainly not made to survice a new motherboard.



Bios :

The bios is very complete also due to the 2 sata controllers that are on the board. The intel ich9r chip takes care of 6 SATA connections with a possibilty of ide, ahci or mode modes. Adding to that is a gigabyte controller with a further 2 sata port and an ide port. This controller also allows ide, ahci and raid modes.

The overclocking section is very complete with easy to understand help and clear selection of parameters. You can have the board do it for you, or you can select each and every parameter yourself. The board allows you to store different overclocking profiles within the bios, so you do not have to remember all the settings instead you can save them under names like "overclocked", "normal", or any other selfmade name.

Flashing the bios has it's own selection on the ep35, so you do not have to boot from a dos floppy. Just insert a usb stick with the new bios and flash
it from the bios flash utility. Furthermore there is an option to have the ep35 make a shadowcopy of your os install. I did not check this as i normally make a backup of vista with the system backup utility in vista itself.

Special options :

On this board there is a power saving option that comes with a program for windows, i tested it and it functions quite well. It will save about 10-20 watts on the out-of-the-wall power needs. However the utility has a horrible large interface and cannot be used when you overclock. It's use is also quite limited.

Problems :

Well there is only one real problem with this board : As soon as you overclock over a FSB of 300, the sleep (s3) function will fail. The board will enter s3 mode without problem, but once you wake the board it will reboot every 5 seconds. The only way to get out of this loop is to cut the power and wait 10 seconds before switching it on again. You will only have this problem with overclocking or when you have one of the new E8xxx cpu's. Gigabyte is informed about this problem and i hope it will be solved in one of the comming bios updates.

The workaround is to have vista go into hibernate mode instead of sleep.

Overclocking :

My current e6600 runs normally at 266x9 mhz, i upped it to 333 x 9 for a cpu speed of 3ghz. The memory multiplier is set at 2,4 so you get a clean 800. This is rock stable, apart from the sleep problem. Xbech on leopard get's a nice a fast 189 score !

OSX leopard fresh install, kalyway :

Leopard works great on this box, the only thing to do is to patch the sound with the 889a kext. The rest works out of the box ! Super !

Conclusion :

All in all this is a good board in it's price class. It has tons of features and is very overclockable. If you don't care that you have to hibernate (xp/vista) or just shutdown (leopard) when overclocked, this board is a 9 out of 10. Hopefully the only issue will be solved with a new bios in the comming weeks.

New motherboard and memory review comming

Today i will replace my old motherboard, an Asrock conroexfire-esata2 with a the gigabyte ga-ep35-ds3r and 4gb of new team elite ddr2-800 ram. All this in because of the just released e8400 that i will be installing on that new board as soon as it is available in the stores here.

So i'll be making a review about the new gigabyte board that will be on the blog as soon as possible. Up until i get the e8400 the board will be running with my current chip an E6600. As the asrock board does not allow overclocking, it will be interesting to see how far i can push that chip on the new board.

As this blog has it's focus on osx86, i will also be testing the new board with leopard. According to the osx86 wiki the gigabyte is fully supported !

New imac did not show up

As you may have noticed already, the update of the imac did not show up today. There are two possibilities, one of them that i was wrong and the update will be in one of the next weeks. For the other possibility i had to phone Steve, and guess what, it is the other possibily !

It's like this : due to the enormous traffic generated from this blog, apple was not able to reach it's own servers on most of the planet. Apple was only able to update the store on the Ivory Coast in Africa, all the rest of the stores have not been updated with the new iMac.

Good that this weekend 1600 new servers will be installed to be able to host this blog, and more importantly, allow Apple to update it's stores next tuesday with the new imac !

Burn or toast, freeware dvd burning OSX

When it comes to burning disks under osx leopard, there are not too many options. It's the build in file burner, or the program toast. However toast is not all that great and as usual with most mac products, it costs money. Spending money for a burning tool is something you can easy avoid, as there is the aptly named "Burn" application that is quick and simple. Burn burns the following formats :

• Data disks : hfs+ (mac), jolliet (pc), udf, hfs+jolliet, dvd-video
  
• Audio disks : Audio cd, mp3 disk
  
• Video disks : vcd, svcd, dvd, divx with on the fly conversion
  
• Disk images : img, dmg, cdr, toast, iso, cue/bin, toc
  
• Disk copy : Everything but audio cd

Burn has a simple 1 screen userinterface and is very easy to use, in true apple style. All this as open source freeware. So drop your toast and burn baby !

You can find the program and more info - here -.

Good & free paint.net

After you spend quite a lot of money on your new pc, or mac for that matter, plus your brand new digicam there is always the forgotten outlay for a nice image editor. However even the entry level image editing software suites are still quite expensive.

However there is more and more good freeware available, and paint.net is one of them. This editor packs quite a punch in just a 1.6mb download. There are effects, layers, corrections, and a very handy color selection wheel. The effects section alone has 29 different filters for you to try out. All of the effects are also more or less real-time, you change the settings and you can see the results for your entire selection immediately. If you like what you see just press Ok, otherwise cancel.

The auto level is fast and mostly gives the instant results that you are looking for in a photo that is not spot-on in exposure. The curves section for both limunosity and rgb, is also very proffesional and handy.

All in all, it's one of the best image editing packages, and because of it's small size it starts up quick too. Give it a try ! You can download it -here-

750 gigabyte drives drop below 100 euro

When looking for a new drive to store your growing collection of data on, i saw that just this weekend the 750 gigabyte sata drives dropped below 100 euro. That's for Germany and it includes that rediculous sales tax of 19% that we have here. The first drive to cross that important barrier is the samsung F1.

It's quite a milestone as now the lowest price per gigabyte is on the 750gb drives. Before that the sweetpoint used to be the 500gb ones. Anyway, great news but filling all those drives will be quite some 'work'.

For our USA readers the drive should be around 120-130 dollars without salestax. So no milestone there yet.

New iMac next tuesday ?

Just under two weeks ago, the apple laptops all got an update and even a little price drop for the entry level models here in the EU. Comming tuesday it's quite possible that the current iMac will get an update very much like the macbooks. So what is going to change ?

• CPU upgrade to the new intel mobile cpu's
• Ram will go from 1gb 667 to 2gb 800mhz
• Entry level harddisk to 320 rest bump to 400 top still 500
• Ati graphics mobilty 3400 and 3600

And hopefully more quality control with the tft screens. No more hairs/chineses food left overs/cracks/dust behind the screen please.

The above list is just my guess, the first 2 are almost certain to be true. With ever decreasing prices for harddisks, the 3rd guess beter be true also. A 750gb sata drive is now below 100 euro's and that's with retail channel markup and sales tax of 19%, so you can imagine that apple will have to pay less than 65 for such a drive.

The ati graphics update is wishfull thinking from my side, as we all know apple could not care less about graphics cards in their imacs...

Install guide for osx86 leopard desktop

After the laptop guide here is the guide for a desktop config that works wonders. First the hardware that is used for the hackingtosh :

• conroexfire-esata2 Motherboard, cheap and very stable
• Intel E6600, any other core2duo will do
• 2gb ddr2-667, more is better of course
• 320gb wd harddisk, any sata harddisk will do too
• 8800gt, other cards will work also but this one is great for both osx86 and vista/games
• An realtek rtl8139 network card, the internal one works also but has problems with torrents
• Any monitor of course and usb keyboard + mouse
• Dvd burner, i have an LG but again most will do

Special settings in the bios : I have the ide mode set to Raid, the disks itself (i have 3 in the pc, 1 for Leopard, 2 for vista) are not in a raid array. Ahci will probably also work. I have the internal lan card switched off, in favor of the rtl8139 lan pci card.

Installing is simpler than with the laptop, you will need the following software mostly from the bay of pirates as usual :

• Kalyway 10.5.1, burn this to a dvd
• Kalyway 10.5.2 update
• Kalyway Kernel update

Dual booting is an option of course, i have vista running and leopard. During the pc startup i choose with the "choose startup drive press f11" option which drive i boot up with. In this way you do not have to install any boot managers and that keeps things clean and simple.

dual....

If you already have vista installed, just buy/get another harddisk and plug that in. Disconnect all other harddisks until you have installed leopard. Then just select whatever drive you want to boot up from the start screen of your bios.

The install instructions :

• 
  Boot up with the kalyway 10.5.1wait for it to load, takes a few minutes
• Select your language
• When the dvd is finished with loading, select diskutil from the menu bar
• Create a 1 partition efi layout, also select efi in the options of the diskutil !
• Select customize from the kalyway menu and select "efi + vanilla kernel"
• Start the install and skip the dvd check, that check is not needed and takes a long time

Here comes the coffee break, it will take about 10-20 minutes for leopard to finish installing itself. When you come back from your coffee, the desktop should be there !

• 
  Install the kalyway combo update 10.5.2 and select vanilla
• Download the apple graphics update from the apple website
• For the 8800gt install this > click <
• Install azalia audio to get sound
• Select to update all software from apple

Done ! That is all there is to it. Everything works, lan / sound / usb / 8800gt / and so on. You will get an xbench score close to 160 with this setup.

Good luck with your setup, questions/comments are welcome !

Comments are switched on so go ahead !

I forgot something with this blog : Switching on the possibility to comment. That is taken care of now so go ahead and write ! Click on the word comments to open up a comment box.

Windows under OSX86

Now that i have leopard running and installed quite a lot of programs, i still miss some software that just is not available under apple's os. A few examples :

• Good usenet program with build in search like usenet explorer just does not exsist
  
• Quicken ; i use the 2002 version where with my financial data of the last 8 years
  
• FTD : fill threads database, dutch program to keep track of latest usenet releases
  

After reading quite a lot of forum posts on windows within osx, i decided to install parallels. Altough it works quite well, it does not feel all that fast. Luckily it's competitor, vmware fusion, is quite a lot faster. 

Installation of fusion is very quick and easy, after that depending on mostly your systems ram you can install xp or vista under fusion. If you have 2gb ram, like my system, i suggest you install the latest xp. With 4 gigabyte of ram or more in your system, you could just as well install a version of vista.

Fusion has a fully automatic mode to install windows, you fill in the options and the serial number and it does a quick unattend install. After everything completes vmware also installs it's runtime tools fully by itself. The last step, as usual with windows, is a lengthy download from windows update to get the latest updates. Or you could find a slipstreamed version with the sp3 service pack of course...

Xp under fusion is amazingly fast, considering it runs on a virtual machine. I have a test setup running with xpsp2 pro with nod32 antivirus and the above mentioned programs. It feels almost as fast as a normal xp install. Fusion even has an expirimental directx9 support, so you could try a few 3d games to see how they perform. Currently it's missing shader support so i doubt that it's of much use with the latest and greatest, however it is a start unliky parallels.

As long as there are some programs that just do not have an equivalent under osx, you will have to run a windows of some sort. Boot camp is great, but you will have to go through a full os shutdown and restart every time. With fusion you get a very good performing virtual machine that runs xp just fine. Only 3d games will still force you to go the bootcamp route.

Cover art, lyrics for iTunes without an account

O.k., now that you have osx86 installed, one of the first things you do is probably to add your music collection to iTunes. I did that myself and of course i wanted the cover art for coverflow, however that is only possible if you take an iTunes account.

Because i don't feel like giving all my personall details, and more importantly credit card details, to apple just to get albumcover art, i searched the net for some utility to make that happen for me.

After a while i found the "gimmesometune"  utility, it does exactly what i want. It adds cover art and it does that mostly correct. It still makes some mistakes here and there, so occasionally you will have to correct it and drag a cover art picture from amazon to iTunes. It also can display the lyrics of most songs that are playing, so if you feel like being silly you can join in yourself with the correct wording instead of "yeah umm umm".

Check it out it's here : Gimmesometune

Expose for Vista

One of the nicest features of OSX is, without doubt, Expose. Altough not as pretty as flip3d, it allows for fast and easy window picking.

Insentient has made a nice little application called Switcher that gives vista a great version of expose. It's even better as the one from Apple, as switcher allow for all kinds of setup options. Give it a try, it small and fast. You can find it here.

Maxell 8gb Usb stick

Just got myself an 8gb Maxell usb stick today, it was on discount for just 25 euro's. It's relativly fast with an 11mb per second write speed and about 17mb per second read speed. It works great under windows/linux/osx. On 8gb you can fit almost 2 dvd's or one hd movie, what else can you say about such an item ? It works, it's fast and it's cheap !

Use Return to open objects under osx

What drives me mad under leopard is that the Enter key in the finder is used to rename a selected object, instead of opening it. When you are used to windows this is one of the annoyances with working with leopard.

Luckily someone made a little program which corrects this the aptly named : Returnopen (click to go to the website).The enter key of the numpad will still rename the file. Uninstall this is a bit difficult so be carefull when you are just trying.

Install guide for osx86 on your laptop

Well here it is, the step by step install guide for leopard 10.5.2 osx86 on your acer laptop. The mentioned software can be found on many torrent sites when you search for the names.

To start you will need the following :

• Kalyway leopard 10.5.2, burn this to a dvd
• Kalyway 10.5.2 comboupdate
• 10.5.2 kernel update
• Acer5220.zip from > click <
• Powermanagement.bundle > click <

Once you have that continue with the following :

• Connect the external monitor to your laptop as the install process has problems with the x3100 integrated graphics. Later on you can disconnect just keep reading !
• Insert the kalyway 10.5.1 disk and boot up from the dvd writer
• Wait for kalyway to load, this takes a few minutes
• Select your language
• when the disk finishes loading, select the diskutil from the top menu
• Create a 1 partition efi, also select efi as in the options section from the diskutil
• Select customize from the kalyway menu and select efi + vanilla kernel
• Start the install, and skip the dvd check as that takes a long time and is not needed

Now get a cup of coffee and wait till the install has finished. It is possible that the install hangs at 1 minute to go, just wait a few minutes normally it will continue. If it takes longer than 10 minutes, just reboot and the install will continue. In the end you will end up at leopards desktop, still on your external monitor.

• Install the kalyway 10.5.2 comboupdate, selecing vanilla kernel
• Install the kernel update 10.5.2
• now connect to the internet with wlan (wired lan does not work) and download the apple graphics update from the apple site.

Now if you reboot, you can disconnect your external monitor and start using the laptop's screen!

• Install the audio from acer5220.zip, or install the osx86 azalia audio which also works
• Install the acpi...kext from acer5220.zip with kext helper
• Copy the powermanagement.bundle file to the system/systemconfig location. For me i had to first delete the exsisting one and then copy the new one. OSX did not let me replace the file.
• Install all apple updates

That's it you now have a fully functional leopard 10.5.2 install on your laptop. A few small problem remain : Lan, ir, cardreader do not work. Also when resuming from sleep, you will have to hit the ESC key to stop the number "7" from being typed continously (don't ask me why) and you will have to switch on airport manually by clicking the topbar icon and selecting airport on.

The Acer 5220

The Acer 5220 is an entry level laptop for a very reasonable price. Depening on where you live, you can find it for 379-429 euro's. For our readers from the USA, that price is including the 19% sales tax that we have here..

The specifications of the laptop are quite good for the price, it is based on the 965 chipset with the x3100 graphics. That allows you to run vista with areo at full speed. Small 3d games also have no problem. The rest of the specs :

• Celeron M530 cpu, 512mb 667 sodimm
• 80GB harddisk, Dvd writer, 15.4 inch widescreen 1200x800 matt screen
• 4 usb ports, lan, wifi, cardreader, pcmcia, vga, svideo, modem, sound, bluetooth

As the memory is a bit smal, i upped this to 1,5gb by adding a 1gb Sodimm.

The build quality of this laptop is very very good, and no different from the rest of the acer lineup. Is there a catch to this price ? Well yes, there is no OS provided ! Of course that only makes it better as now we can choose our own OS.

On the 5220 you can run xp, vista, linux, and most interesting it is very compatible with Leopard ! What ? and acer with apple's os ? Yes that is no problem at all as you will read in the following posts on this subject.