Building a Hackintosh: Research, Buying Parts, and Putting It All Together

This began as a project in 2011. I had gotten into building Hackintoshes in 2010 thanks to a coworker and an article on Lifehacker.com. I wrote a lengthy article about it for Macinstruct, only to find out that my supervisor was off writing his own book, Master Your Mac. Later in 2011 I was browsing amazon and was noticing that many people were self-publishing their books. So I spent the beginning of 2012 writing my own eBook, taking photographs, editing, and rebuilding my machine from the ground up. Now in its 2nd edition, you can buy it from Amazon.com.

As an Apple fanboy and the owner of an underpowered Mac Mini, I was tired of paying too much for good software with excellent design. I wrote the book for similar users, PC users who wanted to get a feel for OS X, and newbies who had little or no technical background or knowledge.

I currently have a website dedicated strictly for the book, buildingahackintosh.weebly.com. It features corrections, new tips, and updates for installation and usage for the current crop of OS X versions.

Projects

Here are a few examples of projects I've worked on.
Lenovo P580

I purchased this from eBay as I was fixing up a laptop for Adele, got two working boards somehow, and found one of them would fit the P580. Hackintosh laptops have to have at least Intel HD3000 graphics built-in, and this HD4000 graphics. As you can see, the screen is split though. By entering a few lines of code at the bootloader screen I can change it.
Lenovo G580

This is one I was working on for Adele after finding out it had a bad board. I was able to replace the board and get it fully working, and even put in a custom keyboard for style.
HP 4440s

According to tonymacx86.com these were easy to work with, so I gave it a shot. The first one I purchased had a non-working board, but I was able to replace it. The files from the site had a customer installer and everything. I was able to put OS X and Windows 7 on the same drive and have it dual-boot, then sold this for a pretty penny on eBay.
Samsung 600B5B

One of the challenges when purchasing a laptop is ensuring that not only the components are correct, but that the BIOS/UEFI (the settings that control the hardware before loading the operating system) provide the right amount of controls to turn on and off certain hardware parameters. Thankfully this Samsung laptop had what I needed. I bought this just to test and see if it would work, and by golly it did! The client I sold it to didn't want OS X so I just reformatted it with Windows.
Gigabyte board with i5-2400

My girlfriend was using a Windows 7 computer but was constantly having issues with security and malware. I persuaded her to let me build her a Hackintosh, but also turned it into a Home Theater PC (HTPC). We eventually ditched cable and just kept Internet access, purchased Sling TV, and simply use that and Netflix for watching TV along with the outdoor antenna.