So many people report success but a half dozen attempts with 20 years of computing to back me up has been nothing but abysmal failure.

I don't know what kind of magical book of voodoo spells these people are using.

I wonder if the web is just biased towards success because generally the people who haven't succeeded have nothing to say.

If so, it would be nice to get insight on the whole picture here somehow

Skyline OS X is a great resource for getting a solid And simple Hackintosh install. I'd recommend trying the guides there.

http://skylineosx.com

It's not hard. Apple computers are still using commodity hardware - that is, you can buy very similar parts off the shelf to build your own system. The closer you get, the easier it is, but there are forums revolving around tweaks and updates to make just about anything work. Even AMD CPUs, which Apple has never used.

It _does_ take some tinkering, though, and if you aren't comfortable with that (or if your time is valuable enough), you should invest in the real deal. :)

If you have the right hardware it can work as good as a real Mac.

But some hardware is just not compatible and that's it, nothing you can do about it.