A UK-based eBayer last week offered for sale a Dell Inspiron 6000 notebook with a difference - this one booted into Apple's Mac OS X operating system, with Windows XP on board as an alternative.

It's all a little bit iffy, of course, since Apple doesn't permit the installation and usage of its software on machines other than its own, but it'll save the buyer from searching Google for the hacks required to get OS X running on a generic PC.

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According to the seller, the Inspiron "boots strait [sic] into Mac... because this specific Inspiron model has the same configuration as a Mac Mini and so with a bit of tweaking to make the BIOS reed [sic] the same as the Mac this installs".

The Mac OS is installed on a 45GB partition - the rest of the Inspiron's 60GB hard drive is dedicated to Windows. The seller bundled a stack of Mac software, complete with original discs for re-installation.

The dual-boot laptop fetched £378 in the end, less than the buy-now price of £425. ®