Welcome to the week They Don’t Want You To Know About. Chris and I risked almost certain doom (or at least an iPod failure) by bringing you this week’s episodes of TechStuff. We addressed two of the most-requested topics we receive from listener mail: hackintoshes and technology conspiracy theories.

I can hear some of you out there asking for the definition of hackintosh. A hackintosh is a non-Apple computer that runs the Macintosh operating system. Apple is very particular about the computers that can run Mac OS X. That’s because Apple works in a closed system — it produces the hardware and software for Mac computers.

Apple designed the Mac OS to work with a particular set of hardware and BIOS settings. To get the Mac OS to run smoothly on a PC, you’ll need a compatible set of components. You’ll also need to tweak your computer’s BIOS settings if you want the OS to operate as if it were on a Mac.

The main reason people try to get the Mac OS to run on other computers comes down to price. Mac computers are fairly expensive. If you want Mac functionality but don’t want to pay Apple’s asking price, your only other option is to try and force the OS onto a PC. Chris and I talk about how this is done in general and some of the challenges hackers face, particularly now that Apple has tweaked Snow Leopard so that it won’t work on PCs with Atom processors.