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See, up to this point, I had avoided the whole “netbook” phenomenon.

They are the hot-selling, stripped-down, little oh-so-cute mini-laptop computers, and they didn’t hold that much appeal to me. But I noticed a bunch of folks using them a couple of months ago at the BlogWorld conference in Las Vegas. And it did make sense, that a lightweight little computer which could go all day on a single charge, would be a great thing to have in my bag–particularly when walking all over the place with said bag on my shoulder.

But I’m still more of a Mac guy whenever possible. And there isn’t a Mac entry in the “netbook” arena. At least not officially.

A few weeks back, I came across this great guide in the blog Gizmodo.com about turning a $300 Dell Mini 10V netbook into a machine that could run the Mac OS X operating system (also known as “Snow Leopard”)

It ends up being known by a way cool nickname: “Hackintosh”. So, yeah…I was quickly hooked on the idea.

Thus, I was planning to make this a nice little holiday project, when I’d have a few days to work through the steps, which seemed simple enough when laid out by the Gizmodo folks. But then the memories of Christmases past with “some assembly required” came flooding into my head and I was almost permanently put off on the idea.

Then Cyber Monday came and Dell’s online store had a great deal on the required netbook, plus I had a coupon and some AMEX points and the next thing I knew–I had ordered one.

It came a week or so later, and I was going to give it to my wonderful spouse to give me as a gift under the tree–but then there were these boots that she had gotten me to give her and she wanted to wear them before Christmas, and the next, next thing we knew–we had given each other an early present that we had bought for ourselves.

(By the way, the boots look great on her.)

It didn’t really require any serious work in assembling the once Windows sporting Dell into a “Hackintosh”. No tools were needed, just a couple of USB flash drives, a legitimate copy of the OS X software (which I already had), some free time and a large dose of patience.

The patience is needed because this is an exercise in following directions, which aren’t all located in just one place. But with a little effort in fits and starts over a weekend, it was actually pretty easy to do.

And what I have now is a computer that acts like a Mac, but is so portable and well… the word cute comes to mind. It’s really hard to resist. It’s only been a few days, but the thing really works quite well and I can see having it with me almost anywhere, anytime.

So that’s how a $300 Dell became my favorite Mac. Until the long rumored Mac “tablet” shows up in 2010.

Then there might be (pardon the bad pun) a small problem.

If you’re so inclined to try this, or just want to read more about the idea: the Gizmodo guide is available by clicking here. More great info is located at the MyDellMini forum located right here.